There are no doubt people who estimate his resolve as Mr. Barrett, so
his daughter declared, regarded Horne when he heard of that poet having
published "Orion" at a farthing: "Perhaps he is going to shoot the
Queen, and is preparing evidence of monomania."

With Browning there never could have been two sides to the question: it
were excusable, it were natural even, had his father wavered. The
outcome of their deliberations was that Robert's further education
should be obtained from travel, and intercourse with men and foreign
literatures.

By this time the poet was twenty. His youth had been uneventful; in a
sense, more so than his boyhood. His mind, however, was rapidly
unfolding, and great projects were casting a glory about the coming
days. It was in his nineteenth year, I have been told on good authority,
that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty, a year or
two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly, no inappropriate lover
for this wooer. Why and when this early passion came to a close, or was
rudely interrupted, is not known. What is certain is that it made a deep
impression on the poet's mind. It may be that it, of itself, or wrought
to a higher emotion by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of
"Pauline," that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of Browning's
genius.

It was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all
freely of his youthful life. Perhaps the earliest record of these
utterances is that which appeared in the _Century Magazine_ in 1881.
From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times
and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac, after
years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast the Titanic