observation at that time would not have appeared despicable to a Seminole or an Iroquois:  he saw and watched everything, the bird on the wing, the snail dragging its shell up the pendulous woodbine, the bee adding to his golden treasure as he swung in the bells of the campanula, the green fly darting hither and thither like an animated seedling, the spider weaving her gossamer from twig to twig, the woodpecker heedfully scrutinising the lichen on the gnarled oak-hole, the passage of the wind through leaves or across grass, the motions and shadows of the clouds, and so forth.  These were his golden holidays.  Much of the rest of his time, when not passed in his room in his father’s house, where he wrote his dramas and early poems, and studied for hours daily, was spent in the Library of the British Museum, in an endless curiosity into the more or less unbeaten tracks of literature.  These London experiences were varied by whole days spent at the National Gallery, and in communion with kindred spirits.  At one time he had rooms, or rather a room, in the immediate neighbourhood of the Strand, whither he could go when he wished to be in town continuously for a time, or when he had any social or theatrical engagement.

Browning’s life at this period was distraught by more than one episode of the heart.  It would be strange were it otherwise.  He had in no ordinary degree a rich and sensuous nature, and his responsiveness was so quick that the barriers of prudence were apt to be as shadowy to him as to the author of “The Witch of Atlas.”  But he was the earnest student for the most part, and, above all, the poet.  His other pleasure, in his happy vagrant days, was to join company with any tramps, gipsies, or other wayfarers, and in good fellowship gain much knowledge of life that was useful at a later time.  Rustic entertainments, particularly peripatetic “Theatres Royal,” had a singular fascination for him, as for that matter had rustic oratory, whether of the alehouse or the pulpit.  At one period he took the keenest interest in sectaries of all kinds:  and often he incurred a gentle reproof from his mother because of his nomad propensities in search of “pastors new.”  There was even a time when he seriously deliberated whether he should not combine literature and religious ministry, as Faraday combined evangelical fervour with scientific enthusiasm. “’Twas a girl with eyes like two dreams of night” that saved him from himself, and defrauded the Church Independent of a stalwart orator.

It was, as already stated, while he strolled through Dulwich Wood one day that the thought occurred to him which was to find development and expression in “Pippa Passes.”  “The image flashed upon him,” writes his intimate friend, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, “of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa or Pippa.”