we are only dictated to by our bodies: we have not perforce to obey them.
A bitter wit once remarked that the soul, if it were ever discovered,
would be found embodied in the gastric juice. He was not altogether a fool,
this man who had learnt in suffering what he taught in epigram;
yet was he wide of the mark.

As a very young child Browning was keenly susceptible to music.
One afternoon his mother was playing in the twilight to herself.
She was startled to hear a sound behind her. Glancing round,
she beheld a little white figure distinct against an oak bookcase,
and could just discern two large wistful eyes looking earnestly at her.
The next moment the child had sprung into her arms, sobbing passionately
at he knew not what, but, as his paroxysm of emotion subsided,
whispering over and over, with shy urgency, "Play! play!"

It is strange that among all his father's collection
of drawings and engravings nothing had such fascination for him
as an engraving of a picture of Andromeda and Perseus by Caravaggio.
The story of the innocent victim and the divine deliverer
was one of which in his boyhood he never tired of hearing:
and as he grew older the charm of its pictorial presentment
had for him a deeper and more complex significance.
We have it on the authority of a friend that Browning had this engraving
always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems.
He has given beautiful commemoration to his feeling for it in "Pauline": --

"Andromeda!
And she is with me -- years roll, I shall change,
But change can touch her not -- so beautiful
With her dark eyes, earnest and still, and hair