Thenceforth his poetic development was rapid, and continuous.
Shelley enthralled him most. The fire and spirit of the great poet's verse,
wild and strange often, but ever with an exquisiteness of music
which seemed to his admirer, then and later, supreme, thrilled him to
a very passion of delight. Something of the more richly coloured,
the more human rhythm of Keats affected him also. Indeed,
a line from the Ode to a Nightingale, in common with one
of the loveliest passages in "Epipsychidion", haunted him above all others:
and again and again in his poems we may encounter vague echoes
of those "remote isles" and "perilous seas" -- as, for example,
in "the dim clustered isles of the blue sea" of "Pauline",
and the "some isle, with the sea's silence on it --
some unsuspected isle in the far seas!" of "Pippa Passes".

But of course he had other matters for mental occupation besides poetry.
His education at Mr. Ready's private academy seems to have been excellent
so far as it went. He remained there till he was fourteen.
Perhaps because of the few boarders at the school, possibly from
his own reticence in self-disclosure, he does not seem
to have impressed any school-mate deeply. We hear of no one
who "knew Browning at school." His best education, after all, was at home.
His father and mother incidentally taught him as much as Mr. Ready:
his love of painting and music was fostered, indirectly:
and in the `dovecot' bookshelf above the fireplace in his bedroom,
were the precious volumes within whose sway and magic was his truest life.

His father, for some reason which has not been made public,
but was doubtless excellent, and is, in the light in which we now regard it,
a matter for which to be thankful, decided to send his son
neither to a large public school, nor, later, to Oxford or Cambridge.