In 1811 he married, and on May 7 of the following year his eldest son, Robert, was born. His wife was the daughter of a German shipowner, William Wiedemann, who had settled and married at Dundee. Wiedemann is said to have been an accomplished draughtsman and musician, and his daughter, without herself sharing these gifts, probably passed them on to her son. Whether she also communicated from her Scottish and German ancestry the "metaphysical" proclivities currently ascribed to him, is a hypothesis absolutely in the air.[1] What is clear is that she was herself intellectually simple and of few ideas, but rich in the temperament, at once nervous and spiritual, which when present in the mother so often becomes genius in the son. "She was a divine woman," such was her son's brief sufficing tribute. Physically he seems to have closely resembled her,[2] and they were bound together by a peculiarly passionate love from first to last. [Footnote 1: A similar but more groundless suggestion, that the author of _Holy-cross Day_ and _Rabbi ben Ezra_ probably had Jewish blood in his veins, can only be described as an impertinence--not to Browning but to the Jewish race. As if to feel the spiritual genius of Hebraism and to be moved by the pathos of Hebraic fate were an eccentricity only to be accounted for by the bias of kin! It is significant that his demonstrable share of German blood left him rather conspicuously impervious to the literary--and more especially to the "metaphysical"--products of the German mind.] [Footnote 2: Browning himself reports the exclamation of the family doctor when trying to diagnose an attack of his: "Why, has anybody to search far for a cause of whatever nervous disorder you may suffer from, when there sits your mother--whom you so absolutely resemble!" (_Letters to E.B.B._, ii. 456.)]