ABSTRACT
The Browning family, which arose near the beginning of the century with the 'fortune-founding grandfather' and ran out with the death of the poet's childless son in 1912, roughly follows Mann's pattern. Browning had, Chesterton claims, a 'memory like the British Museum Library'. By the time Browning was born, all three men had recoiled from the violence and injustice of the successive revolutionary governments and Napoleon's empire; each had sought stability in political and religious orthodoxy, and each had to look backward to see his greatest poetical achievement. In adolescence, so an anecdote goes, Browning imagined two nightingales in his garden to be the spirits of Keats and Shelley; in maturity he wrote poetry markedly different from that of any of the romantic poets. The poem is not a nostalgic reminiscence of childhood, but an argument for education as a form of play adjusted to the age of the child.
