 After his high school education, Browne enlisted in the Forty-sixth Massachusetts Volunteers (1862–63).He married Susan Seaman Brooks in 1867.He went on to study law in Rochester and Ann Arbor; edited the "Lakeside Monthly" (Chicago) (1869–74), "The Alliance" (1878–79), and "The Dial" (1880–1913), a semimonthly literary review.