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ROBERT BROWNING.

ONE who never turned his back but marched breast for

ward,

Never doubted clouds would break,

Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph,

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,

Sleep to wake.

No, at noonday in the bustle of man's work-time,
Greet the unseen with a cheer!

Bid him forward, breast and back as either should be,
'Strive and thrive!' cry 'Speed, - fight on, fare ever

There as here!'"

One can but wonder concerning the life of a man so optimistic; who, amid all the struggles of life, could say in this, his last poem, that we "are baffled to fight better; " who knew that we but "sleep to wake" in a blessed immortality; who never lost his hope, or faith, or cheerfulness; who, in the midst of profound learning, found nothing so satisfying as the Gospel of Christ; who knew how to love, and to write of love, with an intensity rarely equalled; who was a great teacher, leader, inspirer; who lived as he wrote,

"What is left for us, save, in growth

Of soul, to rise up far past both,
From the gift looking to the Giver,
And from the cistern to the River,

And from the finite to Infinity,

And from man's dust to God's divinity ?"

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Robert Browning was born at Camberwell, a suburb of London, May 7, 1812. His father, Robert Browning, then thirty years of age, was one of the confidential clerks in the great house of Rothschild: a man of decided poetic and artistic ability and refinement of character. The poet's grandfather was an Englishman, and his grandmother a Creole; on the side of his mother, who was Scotch, his grandfather was a German from Hamburg, an accomplished draughtsman and musician; his grandmother was Scotch. Thus four nationalities mingled in the original, energetic boy. There were two other children in the family: Sarianna, named after the mother, and Clara.

Mr. William Sharp writes, in his Life of Browning: His mother" was a woman of superior beauty of nature, with a depth of religious feeling saved from narrowness of scope only by a rare serenity and a fathomless charity. Her son's loving admiration of her was almost a passion : even late in life, he rarely spoke of her without tears coming to his eyes. She was, moreover, of an intellectual bent of mind, and with an artistic bias having its readiest fulfilment in music, and, to some extent, in poetry.

"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!""

Before Robert was eight years old, he was meditating whether he should become a painter, a musician, or an author, and, although at last he decided to bend his energies to poetry, he was always a skilled musician and artist.

He began to write when very young. Mr. Edmund Gosse says, "His sister remembers him walking round and round the dining-table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany."

At twelve years of age, he had a volume of poems ready for the press, but could find no publisher. Forty years afterwards, the manuscript poems were returned to him by a friend, and he was amused to find what an influence Byron must have exerted over him at that time.

When about thirteen, he found a pirated edition of Shelley, and became so eager to read his complete works that his mother, after great difficulty, obtained the poems of Shelley and Keats. Shelley had been dead three years, and the booksellers seemed to have forgotten him. Young Browning read and loved both these poets, and was deeply influenced by the thought of the one and the music of the other.

The boy was educated at Dulwich, and at London University, because his parents were Nonconformists. Before his college life was finished, he desired to travel, and his father, a man of means, gratified his only son, thinking that the libraries of Ferrara, Genoa, Padua, Florence, and Rome might be as useful to a poet as that of London University.

At twenty, the young man was in Italy, talking with the peasants in their native tongue, revelling in art, in history, and the beauties of nature.

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