a daughter named Sarianna, after her mother, and Clara.
His wife was a woman of singular 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.
In the latter she inclined to the Romanticists: her husband
always maintained the supremacy of Pope. He looked with much dubiety
upon his son's early writings, "Pauline" and "Paracelsus";
"Sordello", though he found it beyond either his artistic
or his mental apprehension, he forgave, because it was written
in rhymed couplets; the maturer works he regarded with sympathy and pride,
with a vague admiration which passed into a clearer understanding
only when his long life was drawing near its close.

Of his children's company he never tired, even when they were
scarce out of babyhood. He was fond of taking the little Robert in his arms,
and walking to and fro with him in the dusk in "the library",
soothing the child to sleep by singing to him snatches of Anacreon
in the original, to a favourite old tune of his, "A Cottage in a Wood".
Readers of "Asolando" will remember the allusions in that volume to
"my father who was a scholar and knew Greek." A week or two before his death
Browning told an American friend, Mrs. Corson, in reply to a statement of hers
that no one could accuse him of letting his talents lie idle:
"It would have been quite unpardonable in my case not to have done my best.
My dear father put me in a condition most favourable
for the best work I was capable of. When I think of the many authors
who have had to fight their way through all sorts of difficulties,