Badly printed, shamefully mutilated, these discarded blossoms touched
him to a new emotion. Pope became further removed than ever: Byron,
even, lost his magnetic supremacy. From vague remarks in reply to his
inquiries, and from one or two casual allusions, he learned that there
really was a poet called Shelley; that he had written several volumes;
that he was dead.

Strange as it may seem, Browning declared once that the news of this
unknown singer's death affected him more poignantly than did, a year or
less earlier, the tidings of Byron's heroic end at Missolonghi. He
begged his mother to procure him Shelley's works, a request not easily
complied with, for the excellent reason that not one of the local
booksellers had even heard of the poet's name. Ultimately, however, Mrs.
Browning learned that what she sought was procurable at the Olliers' in
Vere Street, London.

She was very pleased with the result of her visit. The books, it is
true, seemed unattractive: but they would please Robert, no doubt. If
that packet had been lost we should not have had "Pauline": we might
have had a different Browning. It contained most of Shelley's writings,
all in their first edition, with the exception of "The Cenci": in
addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, John
Keats, which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her
purchase on Mr. Ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred of
Shelley's writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac
poem in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type and the
imprint "Pisa" at the foot of the title-page, entitled "Adonais." What
an evening for the young poet that must have been. He told a friend it
was a May night, and that in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of
gold," and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour's garden,