hing that did not
help to that end; while into everything that did he seems to have thrown
himself with precocious intensity. Individual anecdotes of his
precocity are told by his biographers; but they are flat beside the
general fact of the depth and character of his studies, and superfluous
of the man who had written 'Pauline' at twenty-one and 'Paracelsus' at
twenty-two. At eighteen he knew himself as a poet, and encountered no
opposition in his chosen career from his father, whose "kindness we must
seek," as Mrs. Sutherland Orr says, "not only in this first, almost
inevitable assent to his son's becoming a writer, but in the subsequent
unfailing readiness to support him in his literary career. 'Paracelsus,'
'Sordello,' and the whole of 'Bells and Pomegranates' were published at
his father's expense, and, incredible as it appears, brought him no
return." An aunt, Mrs. Silverthorne, paid the costs of the earlier
'Pauline.'

From this time of his earliest published work ('Pauline' was issued
without his name in 1833) that part of the story of his life known to
the public, in spite of two or three more or less elaborate biographies,
is mainly the history of his writings and the record of his different
residences, supplemented by less than the usual number of personal
anecdotes, to which neither circumstance nor temperament contributed
material. He had nothing of the attitude of the recluse, like Tennyson;
but while healthily social and a man of the world about him, he was not
one of whom people tell "reminiscences" of consequence, and he was in no
sense a public personality. Little of his correspondence has appeared in
print; and it seems probable that he will be fortunate, to an even
greater degree than Thackeray, in living in his works and escaping the
"ripping up" of the personal chronicler.

He traveled occasionally in the next few years, and in 1838 and again in
1844 visited Italy. In that year, or early in 1845, he became engaged to
Miss Elizabeth Barrett, their acquaintance beginning through a
friend,--her cousin,--and through letters from Browning expressing
admiration for her poems. Miss Barrett had then been for some years an
invalid from an accident, and an enforced recluse; but in September 1846
they were married without the knowledge of her father, and almost
immediately afterward (she leaving her sick room to join him) went to
Paris and then to Italy, where they lived first in Genoa and afterward
in Flor