She was of a nature finely and delicately strung.

Her nervous temperament seems to have been transmitted--robust as he was in many ways--to her son.

The love of music, which her Scottish-German father possessed in a high degree, leaping over a generation, reappeared in Robert Browning.

His capacity for intimate friendships with animals--spider and toad and lizard--was surely an inheritance from his mother.

Mr Stillman received from Browning's sister an account of her mother's unusual power over both wild creatures and household pets.