Then a private tutor was tried, but soon this plan was abandoned, and a system of reading, best described as "natural selection," was followed.
The boy was fourteen, and his sister was twelve, past. These are the ages when children often experience a change of heart, as all "revivalists" know. Robert Browning was swinging off towards atheism. He grew melancholy, irritable and wrote stanzas of sentimental verse. He showed this verse, high-sounding, stilted, bold and bilious, to his mother and then to his father, and finally to Lizzie Flower.
A word about Lizzie Flower: She was nine years older than Robert Browning; and she had a mind that was gracious and full of high aspiration. She loved books, art, music, and all harmony made its appeal to her—and not in vain. She wrote verses and, very sensibly, kept them locked in her workbox; and then she painted in water-colors and worked in worsted. A thoroughly good woman, she was far above the average in character, with a half-minor key in her voice and a tinge of the heartbroken in her composition, caused no one just knew how. Probably a certain young curate at Saint Margaret's could have thrown light on this point; but he married, took on a double chin, moved away to a fat living and never told.
No woman is ever wise or good until destiny has subdued her by grinding her fondest hopes into the dust.
Lizzie Flower was wise and good.
She gave singing lessons to the Browning children. She taught Master Robert Browning to draw.
She read to him some of her verses that were in the sewing-table drawer. And her sister, Sarah Flower, two years older, afterwards Sarah Flower Adams, read aloud to them a hymn she had just written, called, "Nearer, My God, to Thee."
Then soon Master Robert showed the Flower girls some of the verses he had written.
Robert liked Lizzie Flower first-rate, and told his mother so. A young woman never cares anything for an unlicked cub, nine years younger than herself, unless Fate has played pitch and toss with her heart's true love. And then, the tendrils of the affections being ruthlessly lacerated and uprooted, they cling to the first object that presents itself.