daughter came, and this closed the family record.

The invalid mother was a woman of fine feeling and much poetic insight.
She didn't talk as much about books as her husband did, but I think she
knew the good ones better. The mother and son moused in books together,
and Mrs. Orr is surely right in her suggestion that this love of mother
and son took upon itself the nature of a passion.

The love of Robert Browning for Elizabeth Barrett was a revival and a
renewal, in many ways, of the condition of tenderness and sympathy that
existed between Browning and his mother. There certainly was a strange and
marked resemblance in the characters of Elizabeth Barrett and the mother
of Robert Browning; and to many this fully accounts for the instant
affection that Browning felt toward the occupant of the "darkened room,"
when first they met.

The book-collector took much pride in his boy, and used to take him on
book-hunting excursions, and sometimes to the Bank, on which occasions he
would tell the Beef-Eaters how this was Robert Browning, the Third, and
that all three of the R.B.'s were loyal servants of the Bank. And the
Beef-Eaters would rest their staves on the stone floor, and smile
Fifteenth-Century grimaces at the boy from under their cocked hats.

Robert the Third was a healthy, rollicking lad, with power plus, and a
deal of destructiveness in his nature. But destructiveness in a youngster
is only energy not yet properly directed, just as dirt is useful matter in
the wrong place.

To keep the boy out of mischief, he was sent to a sort of kindergarten,
kept by a spinster around the corner. The spinster devoted rather more