at
the other end of it all Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey were
condensed into the little china bottle yonder."[4] It was thus no mere
freak of juvenile taste that took shape in these early Byronic poems. He
entitled them, with the lofty modesty of boyish authorship, _Incondita_,
and his parents sought to publish them. No publisher could be found; but
they won the attention of a notable critic, W.J. Fox, who feared too
much splendour and too little thought in the young poet, but kept his
eye on him nevertheless.

[Footnote 4: _To E.B.B._, Aug. 22, 1846.]

Two years later the boy of fourteen caught the accents of another poetic
voice, destined to touch the sources of music and passion in him with
far more intimate power. His casual discovery, on a bookstall, of "Mr
Shelley's Atheistical poem" seems to have for the first time made known
to him even the name of the poet who had died in Italy four years
before. Something of Shelley's story seems to have been known to his
parents. It gives us a measure of the indulgent sympathy and religious
tolerance which prevailed in this Evangelical home, that the parents
should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of fourteen, at some cost of
time and trouble, with all the accessible writings of the "atheistical"
poet, and with those of his presumably like-minded friend Keats as well.
He fell instantly under the spell of both. Whatever he may have known
before of ancient or modern literature, the full splendour of romantic
poetry here broke upon him for the first time. Immature as he was, he
already responded instinctively to the call of the spirits most
intimately akin to his own. Byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted
him; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too negative,
self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper sources of Browning's
poetry. In Keats and in Shelley he found poetic energies not less
glowing and intense, bent upon making palpable to eye and ear visions of
beauty which, with less of superficial realism, were fed by far more
exquisite and penetrating senses, and attached by more and subtler
filaments to the truth of things. Beyond question this was the decisive
literary experience of Browning's early years. Probably it had a chief
part in making the poet's career his fixed ideal, and ultimately, with
his father's willing consent, his definite choice. What we know of his
inner and outer life during the important years which turned the boy
into the