** Mr. Browning was much interested, in later years, in
hearing Canon, perhaps then already Archdeacon, Farrar extol
his eloquence and ask whether he had known him. Mr. Ruskin
also spoke of him with admiration.

Little need be said about the poet's mother. She was spoken of by
Carlyle as 'the true type of a Scottish gentlewoman.' Mr. Kenyon
declared that such as she had no need to go to heaven, because they made
it wherever they were. But her character was all resumed in her son's
words, spoken with the tremulous emotion which so often accompanied his
allusion to those he had loved and lost: 'She was a divine woman.' She
was Scotch on the maternal side, and her kindly, gentle, but distinctly
evangelical Christianity must have been derived from that source. Her
father, William Wiedemann, a ship-owner, was a Hamburg German settled
in Dundee, and has been described by Mr. Browning as an accomplished
draughtsman and musician. She herself had nothing of the artist about
her, though we hear of her sometimes playing the piano; in all her
goodness and sweetness she seems to have been somewhat matter-of-fact.
But there is abundant indirect evidence of Mr. Browning's love of
music having come to him through her, and we are certainly justified in
holding the Scottish-German descent as accountable, in great measure
at least, for the metaphysical quality so early apparent in the poet's
mind, and of which we find no evidence in that of his father. His strong
religious instincts must have been derived from both parents, though
most anxiously fostered by his mother.

There is yet another point on which Mrs. Browning must have influenced
the life and destinies of her son, that of physical health, or, at
least, nervous constitution. She was a delicate woman, very anaemic
during her later years, and a martyr to neuralgia, which was perhaps a