[Footnote 3: _To E.B.B._, March 3, 1846.]

Curiously enough, it was some fragments of the grandiose but shadowy
Ossian which first stirred the imitative impulse in this poet of
trenchant and clear-cut form. "The first composition I ever was guilty
of," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett (Aug. 25, 1846), "was something in
imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived through two or
three scraps in other books." And long afterwards Ossian was "the first
book I ever bought in my life" (ib.) These "imitations" were apparently
in verse, and in rhyme; and Browning's bent and faculty for both was
very early pronounced. "I never can recollect not writing rhymes; ...
but I knew they were nonsense even then." And a well-known anecdote of
his infancy describes his exhibition of a lively sense of metre in
verses which he recited with emphatic accompaniments upon the edge of
the dining-room table before he was tall enough to look over it. The
crowding thoughts of his maturity had not yet supervened to prevent the
abundant music that he "had in him" from "getting out." It is not
surprising that a boy of these proclivities was captivated by the stormy
swing and sweep of Byron; nor that he should have caught also something
of his "splendour of language," and even, a little later, a reflection,
respectable and suburban enough, of his rebellious Titanism. The less
so, that in Robert's eleventh or twelfth year Byron, the head of the
Satanic school, had become the heroic champion of Greek liberation, and
was probably spoken of with honour in the home of the large-hearted
banker who had in his day suffered so much for the sake of the
unemancipated slave. In later years Browning was accustomed to deliver
himself of breezy sarcasms at the expense of the "flat-fish" who
declaimed so eloquently about the "deep and dark blue ocean." But it is
easy to see that this genial chaff covered a real admiration,--the