It scarcely seems as if we were as robust in our very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility.
Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, a German merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife.

One of the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this union of the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; it is possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographical danger of making mountains out of molehills.

What Browning's mother unquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a very strong religious habit, and a great belief in manners.

Thomas Carlyle called her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman," and the phrase has a very real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition of Scotland, one of the very few European countries where large sections of the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combines two descriptions of dignity at the same time.

Little more is known of this lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bear to look at places where she had walked.
Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum.
In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leave because he was too clever to be tolerable.