Profession: poet

He met his lifelong friend Hawthorne as a student; Emerson and Holmes later joined them in a circle of friends in Cambridge (Emerson called him “a sweet and beautiful soul”). As a young man he was acquainted with da Ponte. Irving encouraged him; he encouraged Wharton’s childhood writing. Whitman knew and liked him, while thinking his poetry innocuous. He wrote a poem in honour of his friend Agassiz’s 50th birthday. Dickens was a good friend, Ruskin was very taken by his young daughter, and in old age he visited Tennyson (who took him to be photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron).

Eliot met him while she was editing the Westminster Review — both members of the literary circle gathered around its publisher. Wordsworth wrote an encouraging review of Browning’s work, leading to a significant friendship (as also with Carlyle). Tennyson and Browning didn’t immediately hit it off, but became firm lifelong friends. Dickens, Martineau, Rossetti and Procter were also among his circle of friends, Etty and Ruskin among his correspondents. Browning had written rapturously to the invalid Elizabeth Barrett, having read her poetry: thwarting her over-protective father, they married in secret and settled in Italy.

Of his friends, Carlyle described him as “dusty, smoky, free and easy”, Thackeray as “a great poetical boa-constrictor.” The Brownings and Millais were others in his London circle, and when he was driven away by the railway and the smell of cabbages, Cameron became a good neighbour. He was godfather to one of Dickens’ sons. Rossetti was a friend, Lear eventually found him querulous and irritating, Carroll said he was so short-sighted that he had to introduce himself, and Hardy wished he’d visited him more. James said he could he could drink a whole bottle of port at a go; Babbage wrote to correct his maths.

He studied philosophy with Fichte and Schelling. Schubert and he became close friends; they were arrested together at Senn’s by police hunting subversives, and he introduced Schubert to his friend von Platen’s homoerotic poetry. He used his house for Schubertiads — evenings where the composer and a small group of friends sang Schubert’s songs. Schubert and he broke off their friendship over Bruchmann’s attitude to his sister’s secret engagement, an event leading to a spiritual crisis and his eventual ordination as a priest. His poems remained unpublished, except for the five that Schubert set to music.

This chronically self-deprecating and depressive poet was an important influence on Schubert, and one of those who regularly foregathered with him to sing his songs. Schubert set dozens of his poems to music (starting the first time they met), and they collaborated on an opera. They shared lodgings for 3 years (“two somewhat impractical gentlemen”, their landlady said), and although the friendship eventually broke down, he wrote an elegy on Schubert’s death. Senn and Bruchmann were among his other friends (and Schubert’s). He impressed Bauernfeld, though the two didn’t exactly like each other.