A time came when Robert Browning must make choice of a future career.  His interests in life were manifold, but in some form or another art was the predominant interest.  His father remembered his own early inclinations, and how they had been thwarted; he recognised the rare gifts of his son, and he resolved that he should not be immured in the office of a bank.  Should he plead at the bar?  Should he paint?  Should he be a maker of music, as he at one time desired, and for music he always possessed an exceptional talent?  When his father spoke to him, Robert Browning knew that his sister was not dependent on any effort of his to provide the means of living.  “He appealed,” writes Mr Gosse, “to his father, whether it would not be better for him to see life in the best sense, and cultivate the powers of his mind, than to shackle himself in the very outset of his career by a laborious training, foreign to that aim. ...  So great was the confidence of the father in the genius of his son that the former at once acquiesced in the proposal.”  It was decided that he should take to what an old woman of the lake district, speaking of “Mr Wudsworth,” described as “the poetry business.”  The believing father was even prepared to invest some capital in the concern.  At his expense Paracelsus, Sordello, and Bells and Pomegranates were published.

A poet may make his entrance into literature with small or large inventions, by carving cherry-stones or carving a colossus.  Browning, the creator of men and women, the fashioner of minds, would be a sculptor of figures more than life-size rather than an exquisite jeweller; the attempt at a Perseus of this Cellini was to precede his brooches and buttons.  He planned, Mr Gosse tells us, “a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls.”  In a modification of this vast scheme Paracelsus, which includes more speakers than one, and Sordello, which is not dramatic in form, find their places.  They were preceded by Pauline, in the strictest sense a monodrama, a poem not less large in conception than either of the others, though this “fragment of a confession” is wrought out on a more contracted scale.

Pauline, published without the writer’s name—­his aunt Silverthorne bearing the cost of publication—­was issued from the press in January 1833.[12] Browning had not yet completed his twenty-first year.  When including it among his poetical works in 1867, he declared that he did so with extreme repugnance and solely with a view to anticipate unauthorised republication of what was no more than a “crude preliminary sketch,” entirely lacking in good draughtsmanship and right handling.  For the edition of twenty years later, 1888, he revised and corrected Pauline without re-handling it to any considerable extent.  In truth Pauline is a poem from which Browning ought not to have desired to detach his mature self.  Rarely does a poem by a writer so young deserve better