upon the publication of "Paracelsus," determined to devote himself to
poetic work which should have so direct a contact with actual life that
its appeal should reach even to the most uninitiate in the mysteries and
delights of verse.

In his early years Browning had always a great liking for walking in the
dark. At Camberwell he was wont to carry this love to the point of
losing many a night's rest. There was, in particular, a wood near
Dulwich, whither he was wont to go. There he would walk swiftly and
eagerly along the solitary and lightless byways, finding a potent
stimulus to imaginative thought in the happy isolation thus enjoyed,
with all the concurrent delights of natural things, the wind moving like
a spirit through the tree-branches, the drifting of poignant fragrances,
even in winter-tide, from herb and sappy bark, imperceptible almost by
the alertest sense in the day's manifold detachments. At this time, too,
he composed much in the open air. This he rarely, if ever, did in later
life. Not only many portions of "Paracelsus," but several scenes in
"Strafford," were enacted first in these midnight silences of the
Dulwich woodland. Here, too, as the poet once declared, he came to know
the serene beauty of dawn: for every now and again, after having read
late, or written long, he would steal quietly from the house, and walk
till the morning twilight graded to the pearl and amber of the new day.

As in childhood the glow of distant London had affected him to a
pleasure that was not without pain, perhaps to a pain rather that was a
fine delirium, so in his early manhood the neighbourhood of the huge
city, felt in those midnight walks of his, and apprehended more by the
transmutive shudder of reflected glare thrown fadingly upward against
the stars, than by any more direct vision or even far-borne
indeterminate hum, dominated his imagination. At that distance, in those