We hear also of a tender boyish sentiment, settling into friendship, for Miss Eliza Flower, his senior by nine years, for whose musical compositions he had an ardent admiration: "I put it apart from all other English music I know," he wrote as late as 1845, "and fully believe in it as _the_ music we all waited for." With her sister Sarah, two years younger than Eliza, best known by her married name Sarah Flower Adams and remembered by her hymn, written in 1840, "Nearer my God to Thee," he discussed as a boy his religious difficulties, and in proposing his own doubts drew forth her latent scepticism as to the orthodox beliefs.

"It was in answering Robert Browning;" she wrote, "that my mind refused to bring forward argument, turned recreant, and sided with the enemy." Something of this period of Browning's _Sturm und Drang_ can be divined through the ideas and imagery of _Pauline._[10] The finer influence of Shelley upon the genius of Browning in his youth proceeded from something quite other than those doctrinaire abstractions--the formulas of revolution--which Shelley had caught up from Godwin and certain French thinkers of the eighteenth century.
Browning's spirit from first to last was one which was constantly reaching upward through the attainments of earth to something that lay beyond them.

A climbing spirit, such as his, seemed to perceive in Shelley a spirit that not only climbed but soared.

He could in those early days have addressed to Shelley words written later, and suggested, one cannot but believe, by his feeling for his wife: You must be just before, in fine, See and make me see, for your part, New depths of the Divine! Shelley opened up for his young and enthusiastic follower new vistas leading towards the infinite, towards the unattainable Best.

Browning's only piece of prose criticism--apart from scattered comments in his letters--is the essay introductory to that volume of letters erroneously ascribed to Shelley, which was published when Browning was but little under forty years old.