and Clara. His wife was a woman of
singular beauty of nature, with a depth of religious feeling saved from
narrowness of scope only by a rare serenity and a fathomless charity.
Her son's loving admiration of her was almost a passion: even late in
life he rarely spoke of her without tears coming to his eyes. She was,
moreover, of an intellectual bent of mind, and with an artistic bias
having its readiest fulfilment in music, and, to some extent, in poetry.
In the latter she inclined to the Romanticists: her husband always
maintained the supremacy of Pope. He looked with much dubiety upon his
son's early writings, "Pauline" and "Paracelsus"; "Sordello," though he
found it beyond either his artistic or his mental apprehension, he
forgave, because it was written in rhymed couplets; the maturer works he
regarded with sympathy and pride, with a vague admiration which passed
into a clearer understanding only when his long life was drawing near
its close.

Of his children's company he never tired, even when they were scarce out
of babyhood. He was fond of taking the little Robert in his arms, and
walking to and fro with him in the dusk in "the library," soothing the
child to sleep by singing to him snatches of Anacreon in the original,
to a favourite old tune of his, "A Cottage in a Wood." Readers of
"Asolando" will remember the allusions in that volume to "my father who
was a scholar and knew Greek." A week or two before his death Browning
told an American friend, Mrs. Corson, in reply to a statement of hers
that no one could accuse him of letting his talents lie idle: "It would
have been quite unpardonable in my case not to have done my best. My
dear father put me in a condition most favourable for the best work I
was capable of. When I think of the many authors who have had to fight
their way through all sorts of difficulties, I have no reason to be
proud of my achievements. My good father sacrificed a fortune to his
convictions. He could not bear with slavery, and left India and
accepted a humble bank-office in London. He secured for me all the ease
and comfort that a literary man needs to do good work. It would have
been shameful if I had not done my best to realise his expectations of
me."[5]

[Footnote 5: 'India' is a slip on the part either of Browning or of Mrs.
Corson. The poet's father was never in India. He was quite a youth when
he went to his mother's sugar-plantation at St. Kitts, in the West
Indies.]

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