Near at hand, too, was the Dulwich Gallery,--"a green half-hour's walk across the fields,"-- a beloved haunt of his childhood, to which he never ceased to be grateful.[3] But his father's overflowing library and portfolios played the chief part in his early development.
He read voraciously, and apparently without restraint or control.

The letters of Junius and of Horace Walpole were familiar to him "in boyhood," we are assured with provoking indefiniteness by Mrs Orr; as well as "all the works of Voltaire." Most to his mind, however, was the rich sinewy English and athletic fancy of the seventeenth-century Fantastic Quarles; a preference which foreshadowed his later delight in the great master of the Fantastic school, and of all who care for close-knit intellect in poetry, John Donne.
[Footnote 3: _To E.B.B._, March 3, 1846.] Curiously enough, it was some fragments of the grandiose but shadowy Ossian which first stirred the imitative impulse in this poet of trenchant and clear-cut form.

"The first composition I ever was guilty of," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett (Aug.

25, 1846), "was something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived through two or three scraps in other books." And long afterwards Ossian was "the first book I ever bought in my life" (ib.) These "imitations" were apparently in verse, and in rhyme; and Browning's bent and faculty for both was very early pronounced.

"I never can recollect not writing rhymes; ...
but I knew they were nonsense even then." And a well-known anecdote of his infancy describes his exhibition of a lively sense of metre in verses which he recited with emphatic accompaniments upon the edge of the dining-room table before he was tall enough to look over it.