an immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast in a
mold designed for prodigious work."

"I begged him," continued Mr. Duffy, in writing of conversations with
Carlyle, "to tell me something of the author of a serial I had come
across lately, called _Bells and Pomegranates_, printed in painfully
small type, on inferior paper, but in which I took great delight.
There were ballads to make the heart beat fast, and one little
tragedy, _The Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, which, though not over-disposed
to what he called sentimentality, I could not read without tears. The
heroine's excuse for the sin which left a blot in a 'scutcheon
stainless for a thousand years, was, in the circumstances of the case,
as touching a line as I could recall in English poetry:

I had no mother, and we were so young."

He said Robert Browning had a powerful intellect, and among the men
engaged in literature in England just now was one of the few from whom
it was possible to expect something. He was somewhat uncertain about
his career, and he himself (Carlyle) had perhaps contributed to the
trouble by assuring him that poetry was no longer a field where any
true or worthy success could be won or deserved. If a man had anything
to say entitled to the attention of rational creatures, all mortals
would come to recognize after a little that there was a more effectual
way of saying it than in metrical numbers. Poetry used to be regarded
as the natural, and even the essential language of feeling, but it was
not at all so; there was not a sentiment in the gamut of human passion
which could not be adequately expressed in prose.

Browning's earliest works had been loudly applauded by undiscerning
people, but he was now heartily ashamed of them, and hoped in the end
to do something altogether different from _Sordello_ and _Paracelsus_.
He had strong ambition and great confidence in himself, and was
considering his future course just now. When he first met young
Browning, he was a youth living with his parents, people of
respectable position among the Dissenters, but not wealthy neither,
and the little room in which he kept his books was in that sort of
trim that showed that he was the apple of their eyes. He was about six
and thirty at present, and a little time before had married Miss
Barrett. She had long been confined to a sofa by a spinal disease, and
seemed destined to end there very speedily, but the ending was to be
quite otherwise, as it