knew not
what, but, as his paroxysm subsided, whispering with shy urgency: 'Play!
Play!'"

In various ways the boy Robert was noticeably precocious. He could not
remember a time, he said, when he did not rhyme, and his sister records
that as a very little boy he used to walk around the table "spanning out
on the smooth mahogany the scansion of verses he had composed." Some of
these early lines he could recall and he could recall, too, the
prodigious satisfaction with which he uttered them, especially the
sentence he put into the mouth of a man who had just committed
murder--"Now my soul is satisfied." At twelve he had a volume named
_Incondita_ ready for publication. To discerning eyes the little volume
was a production of great promise, dominated though it was by the
influence of his father's idol, Pope, and of his own temporary ruling
deity, Byron. But a publisher was not found, and in later years, at
Browning's request, the two extant manuscript copies of _Incondita_ were
destroyed, along with many others of his youthful poems that had been
preserved by his father.

Browning's early tastes in the realm of poetry were, on the whole,
romantic. "Now here is the truth," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "the first
book I ever bought in my life was Ossian--and years before that the
first _composition_ I ever was guilty of was something in _imitation_ of
Ossian whom I had not read, but _conceived_, through two or three
scraps in other books." But the decisive literary influence was yet to
come. When he was fourteen he happened to see on a bookstall a volume
marked, "Mr. Shelley's Atheistical Poem. Very Scarce"; and he at once
wished to know more of this Mr. Shelley. After a perplexing search his
mother found the desired poems, most of them in first editions, at the
Olliers, Vere Street, London. She took home also three volumes by
another poet, John Keats, who, she was told, was the subject of an elegy
by Shelley. Browning never forgot the May evening when he first read
these new books, to the accompaniment, he said, of two nightingales, one
in a copper-beech, one in a laburnum, each striving to outdo the other
in melody. A new imaginative world was opened to the boy. In
_Memorabilia_ he afterwards recorded the strong intellectual and
emotional excitement, the thrill and ecstasy of this poetical
experience. To Shelley especially did he give immediate and fervid
personal loyalty, even to the extent of endeavoring to follow him in