Something of Shelley's story seems to have been known to his parents.

It gives us a measure of the indulgent sympathy and religious tolerance which prevailed in this Evangelical home, that the parents should have unhesitatingly supplied the boy of fourteen, at some cost of time and trouble, with all the accessible writings of the "atheistical" poet, and with those of his presumably like-minded friend Keats as well.
He fell instantly under the spell of both.

Whatever he may have known before of ancient or modern literature, the full splendour of romantic poetry here broke upon him for the first time.

Immature as he was, he already responded instinctively to the call of the spirits most intimately akin to his own.

Byron's stormy power thrilled and delighted him; but it was too poor in spiritual elements, too negative, self-centred, and destructive to stir the deeper sources of Browning's poetry.