seemed unattractive: but they would please Robert, no doubt.
If that packet had been lost we should not have had "Pauline": we might
have had a different Browning. It contained most of Shelley's writings,
all in their first edition, with the exception of "The Cenci":
in addition, there were three volumes by an even less known poet, John Keats,
which kindly Mrs. Browning had been persuaded to include in her purchase
on Mr. Ollier's assurance that they were the poetic kindred
of Shelley's writings, and that Mr. Keats was the subject of the elegiac poem
in the purple paper cover, with the foreign-looking type
and the imprint "Pisa" at the foot of the title-page, entitled "Adonais".
What an evening for the young poet that must have been. He told a friend
it was a May night, and that in a laburnum, "heavy with its weight of gold,"
and in a great copper-beech at the end of a neighbour's garden,
two nightingales strove one against the other. For a moment
it is a pleasant fancy to imagine that there the souls of Keats and Shelley
uttered their enfranchised music, not in rivalry but in welcome.
We can realise, perhaps, something of the startled delight,
of the sudden electric tremors, of the young poet when, with eager eyes,
he turned over the pages of "Epipsychidion" or "Prometheus Unbound",
"Alastor" or "Endymion", or the Odes to a Nightingale, on Melancholy,
on a Grecian Urn.

More than once Browning alluded to this experience as his first pervasive joy,
his first free happiness in outlook. Often in after life he was fain,
like his "wise thrush", to "recapture that first fine carefree rapture."
It was an eventful eve.

"And suddenly, without heart-wreck, I awoke
As from a dream."