the fireplace; with, below all, the vaguely heard accompaniment--from
the neighbouring room where Mrs. Browning sat "in her chief happiness,
her hour of darkness and solitude and music"--of a wild Gaelic lament,
with its insistent falling cadences. A story concerning his poetic
precocity has been circulated, but is not worth repeating. Most children
love jingling rhymes, and one need not be a born genius to improvise a
rhyming couplet on an occasion.

It is quite certain that in nothing in these early poemicules, in such
at least as have been preserved without the poet's knowledge and against
his will, is there anything of genuine promise. Hundreds of youngsters
have written as good, or better, Odes to the Moon, Stanzas on a
Favourite Canary, Lines on a Butterfly. What is much more to the point
is, that at the age of eight he was able not only to read, but to take
delight in Pope's translation of Homer. He used to go about declaiming
certain couplets with an air of intense earnestness highly diverting to
those who overheard him.

About this time also he began to translate the simpler odes of Horace.
One of these (viii. Bk. II.) long afterwards suggested to him the theme
of his "Instans Tyrannus." It has been put on record that his sister
remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round the
dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his
hand on the smooth mahogany. He was scarce more than a child when, one
Guy Fawkes' day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song, whose
burden was, "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!" This refrain
haunted him often in the after years. That beautiful fantastic romance,
"The Flight of the Duchess," was born out of an insistent memory of this
woman's snatch of song, heard in childhood. He was ten when, after
several _passions malheureuses_, this precocious Lothario plunged into a