Boyish verses, written under the Byronic influence, were gathered into a group when the writer was but twelve years old; a title--_Incondita_--was found, and Browning's parents had serious intentions of publishing the manuscript.

Happily the manuscript, declined by publishers, was in the end destroyed, and editors have been saved from the necessity of printing or reprinting these crudities of a great poet's childhood.
Their only merit, he assured Mr Gosse, lay in "their mellifluous smoothness." It was an event of capital importance in the history of Browning's mind when--probably in his thirteenth year--he lighted, in exploring a book-stall, upon a copy of one of the pirated editions of Shelley's _Queen Mab_ and other poems.

Through the zeal of his good mother on the boy's behalf the authorised editions were at a later time obtained; and she added to her gift the works, as far as they were then in print, of Keats.[9] If ever there was a period of _Sturm und Drang_ in Browning's life, it was during the years in which he caught from Shelley the spirit of the higher revolt.

A new faith and unfaith came to him, radiant with colour, luminous with the brightness of dawn, and uttered with a new, keen, penetrating melody.

The outward conduct of his life was obedient in all essentials to the good laws of use and wont.