into art. Fate was kind: success came his way so slowly that he was never
subjected to the fierce, dazzling searchlight of publicity; his
recognition in youth was limited to a few obscure friends and neighbors.
And when distance divided him from these, they forgot him; so there seems
a hiatus in his history, when for a score of years literary England dimly
remembered some one by the name of Browning, but could not just place him.

About the year Eighteen Hundred Sixty-eight the author of "Sordello" was
induced to appear at an evening of "Uncut Leaves" at the house of a
nobleman at the West End, London. James Russell Lowell was present and
was congratulated by a lady, sitting next to him, on the fact that
Browning was an American.

"But only by adoption!" answered the gracious Lowell.

"Yes," said the lady; "I believe his father was an Englishman, so you
Americans can not have all the credit; but surely he shows the Negro or
Indian blood of his mother. Very clever, isn't he?--so very clever!"

Browning's swarthy complexion, and the fine poise of the man--the entire
absence of "nerves," as often shown in the savage--seemed to carry out the
idea that his was a peculiar pedigree. In his youth, when his hair was as
black as the raven's wing and coarse as a horse-tail, and his complexion
mahogany, the report that he was a Creole found ready credence. And so did
this gossip of mixed parentage follow him that Mrs. Sutherland Orr, in her
biography, takes an entire chapter to prove that in Robert Browning's
veins there flowed neither Indian nor Negro blood.

Doctor Furnivall, however, explains that Browning's grandmother on his
father's side came from the West Indies, that nothing is known of her