two nightingales strove one against the other. For a moment it is a
pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley
uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome. We can
realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight, of the sudden
electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes, he turned
over the pages of "Epipsychidion" or "Prometheus Unbound," "Alastor" or
"Endymion," or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy, on a Grecian
Urn.

More than once Browning alluded to this experience as his first
pervasive joy, his first free happiness in outlook. Often in after life
he was fain, like his "wise thrush," to "recapture that first fine
careless rapture." It was an eventful eve.

"And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke
As from a dream."

Thenceforth his poetic development was rapid, and continuous. Shelley
enthralled him most. The fire and spirit of the great poet's verse, wild
and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music which seemed
to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to a very passion
of delight. Something of the more richly coloured, the more human rhythm
of Keats affected him also. Indeed, a line from the Ode to a
Nightingale, in common with one of the loveliest passages in
"Epipsychidion," haunted him above all others: and again and again in
his poems we may encounter vague echoes of those "remote isles" and
"perilous seas"--as, for example, in "the dim clustered isles of the
blue sea" of "Pauline," and the "some isle, with the sea's silence on
it--some unsuspected isle in the far seas!" of "Pippa Passes."