passionate love from first to last.

[Footnote 1: A similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author
of _Holy-cross Day_ and _Rabbi ben Ezra_ probably had Jewish
blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence--not to
Browning but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of
Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an
eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! It is
significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather
conspicuously impervious to the literary--and more especially to the
"metaphysical"--products of the German mind.]

[Footnote 2: Browning himself reports the exclamation of the family
doctor when trying to diagnose an attack of his: "Why, has anybody to
search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer
from, when there sits your mother--whom you so absolutely resemble!"
(_Letters to E.B.B._, ii. 456.)]

The home in Camberwell into which the boy Robert was born reflected the
serene, harmonious, self-contented character of his parents. Friends
rarely disturbed the even tenor of its ways, and the storms of politics
seem to have intruded as faintly into this suburban seclusion as the
roar of London. Books, business, and religion provided a framework of
decorous routine within which these kindly and beautiful souls moved
with entire content. Well-to-do Camberwell perhaps contained few homes
so pure and refined; but it must have held many in which the life-blood
of political and social interests throbbed more vigorously, and where
thought and conversation were in closer touch with the intellectual life
of the capital and the larger movements of the time. Nothing in
Browning's boyhood tended to open his imagination to the sense of