Touch Images in the Poetry of Robert Browning

Extract

“There's printing a book of ‘Selections from R. B.‘ (Sculptor and poet) which is to popularize my old things; …” Thus wrote Robert Browning to his friend, W. W. Story, in the spring of 1862, humorously alluding to the joyous companionship in Story's studio two years earlier, when he had been spending as much as three hours daily, thumping the wet clay. Nothing but clay did he care for, “poor lost soul,”—so Mrs. Browning had at that time declared, for she grudged a little the time taken from his poetry. And this enthusiasm had been a matter of more than one winter. Very vivid is the memory of it, therefore, in 1862. “I try and see old friends,” the poet writes, in the letter already quoted, “when my true treat would be an evening over the piles of unread books, or a morning with the old coat and wet clay. Oh, the days!” Robert Browning, sculptor and poet; here is a key to unlock,—not, indeed, the heart, but at least some secrets of the brain and hand of the robust craftsman.