love affair whose intensity was only equalled by its hopelessness. A
trifle of fifteen years' seniority and a husband complicated matters,
but it was not till after the reckless expenditure of a Horatian ode
upon an unclassical mistress that he gave up hope. The outcome of this
was what the elder Browning regarded as a startling effusion of much
Byronic verse. The young Robert yearned for wastes of ocean and
illimitable sands, for dark eyes and burning caresses, for despair that
nothing could quench but the silent grave, and, in particular, for
hollow mocking laughter. His father looked about for a suitable school,
and decided to entrust the boy's further education to Mr. Ready, of
Peckham.

Here he remained till he was fourteen. But already he knew the dominion
of dreams. His chief enjoyment, on holiday afternoons, was to gain an
unfrequented spot, where three huge elms re-echoed the tones of
incoherent human music borne thither-ward by the west winds across the
wastes of London. Here he loved to lie and dream. Alas, those elms, that
high remote coign, have long since passed to the "hidden way" whither
the snows of yester year have vanished. He would lie for hours looking
upon distant London--a golden city of the west literally enough,
oftentimes, when the sunlight came streaming in long shafts from behind
the towers of Westminster and flashed upon the gold cross of St. Paul's.
The coming and going of the cloud-shadows, the sweeping of sudden rains,
the dull silvern light emanating from the haze of mist shrouding the
vast city, with the added transitory gleam of troubled waters, the
drifting of fogs, at that distance seeming like gigantic veils
constantly being moved forward and then slowly withdrawn, as though some
sinister creature of the atmosphere were casting a net among all the
dross and débris of human life for fantastic sustenance of its own--all
this endless, ever-changing, always novel phantasmagoria had for him an