It was certainly about this time, as he admitted once
in one of his rare reminiscent moods, that Browning felt the artistic impulse
stirring within him, like the rising of the sap in a tree.
He remembered his mother's music, and hoped to be a musician: he recollected
his father's drawings, and certain seductive landscapes and seascapes
by painters whom he had heard called "the Norwich men", and he wished
to be an artist: then reminiscences of the Homeric lines he loved,
of haunting verse-melodies, moved him most of all.

"I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me:
. . . verse alone, one life allows me."

He now gave way to the compulsive Byronic vogue, with an occasional relapse
to the polished artificialism of his father's idol among British poets.
There were several ballads written at this time: if I remember aright,
the poet specified the "Death of Harold" as the theme of one. Long afterwards
he read these boyish forerunners of "Over the sea our galleys went",
and "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix",
and was amused by their derivative if delicate melodies.
Mrs. Browning was very proud of these early blooms of song,
and when her twelve-year-old son, tired of vain efforts
to seduce a publisher from the wary ways of business,
surrendered in disgust his neatly copied out and carefully stitched MSS.,
she lost no opportunity -- when Mr. Browning was absent --
to expatiate upon their merits. Among the people to whom she showed them
was a Miss Flower. This lady took them home, perused them,