About this time also he began to translate the simpler odes of Horace.
One of these (viii. Bk. II.) long afterwards suggested to him
the theme of his "Instans Tyrannus". It has been put on record
that his sister remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round
the dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses
with his hand on the smooth mahogany. He was scarce more than a child when,
one Guy Fawkes' day, he heard a woman singing an unfamiliar song,
whose burden was, "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!" This refrain
haunted him often in the after years. That beautiful fantastic romance,
"The Flight of the Duchess", was born out of an insistent memory
of this woman's snatch of song, heard in childhood. He was ten when,
after several `passions malheureuses', this precocious Lothario plunged
into a love affair whose intensity was only equalled by its hopelessness.
A trifle of fifteen years' seniority and a husband complicated matters,
but it was not till after the reckless expenditure of a Horatian ode upon
an unclassical mistress that he gave up hope. The outcome of this was what
the elder Browning regarded as a startling effusion of much Byronic verse.
The young Robert yearned for wastes of ocean and illimitable sands,
for dark eyes and burning caresses, for despair that nothing could quench
but the silent grave, and, in particular, for hollow mocking laughter.
His father looked about for a suitable school, and decided
to entrust the boy's further education to Mr. Ready, of Peckham.

Here he remained till he was fourteen. But already he knew
the dominion of dreams. His chief enjoyment, on holiday afternoons,
was to gain an unfrequented spot, where three huge elms re-echoed
the tones of incoherent human music borne thitherward by the west winds
across the wastes of London. Here he loved to lie and dream.
Alas, those elms, that high remote coign, have long since passed
to the "hidden way" whither the snows of yester year have vanished.