poetry here broke upon him for the first time. Immature as he was, he
already responded instinctively to the call of the spirits most
intimately akin to his own. Byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted
him; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too negative,
self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper sources of Browning's
poetry. In Keats and in Shelley he found poetic energies not less
glowing and intense, bent upon making palpable to eye and ear visions of
beauty which, with less of superficial realism, were fed by far more
exquisite and penetrating senses, and attached by more and subtler
filaments to the truth of things. Beyond question this was the decisive
literary experience of Browning's early years. Probably it had a chief
part in making the poet's career his fixed ideal, and ultimately, with
his father's willing consent, his definite choice. What we know of his
inner and outer life during the important years which turned the boy
into the man is slight and baffling enough. The fiery spirit of poetry
can rarely have worked out its way with so little disturbance to the
frame. Minute scrutiny has disclosed traits of unrest and revolt; he
professed "atheism" and practised vegetarianism, betrayed at times the
aggressive arrogance of an able youth, and gave his devoted and tender
parents moments of very superfluous concern. For with all his immensely
vivacious play of brain, there was something in his mental and moral
nature from first to last stubbornly inelastic and unimpressible, that
made him equally secure against expansion and collapse. The same simple
tenacity of nature which kept his buoyantly adventurous intellect
permanently within the tether of a few primary convictions, kept him, in
the region of practice and morality, within the bounds of a rather nice
and fastidious decorum. Malign influences effected no lodgment in a
nature so fundamentally sound; they might cloud and trouble imagination
for a while, but their scope hardly extended further, and as they were
literary in origin, so they were mainly literary in expression. In the