extraordinary fascination. One of the memorable nights of his boyhood
was an eve when he found his way, not without perturbation of spirit
because of the unfamiliar solitary dark, to his loved elms. There, for
the first time, he beheld London by night. It seemed to him then more
wonderful and appalling than all the host of stars. There was something
ominous in that heavy pulsating breath: visible, in a waning and waxing
of the tremulous, ruddy glow above the black enmassed leagues of
masonry; audible, in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across
the crests of Norwood. It was then and there that the tragic
significance of life first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning
spirit: that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a
corresponding chord.




CHAPTER II.


It was certainly about this time, as he admitted once in one of his rare
reminiscent moods, that Browning felt the artistic impulse stirring
within him, like the rising of the sap in a tree. He remembered his
mother's music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected his father's
drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes by painters
whom he had heard called "the Norwich men," and he wished to be an
artist: then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved, of haunting
verse-melodies, moved him most of all.

"I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,