By virtue of its central theme Pauline is closely related to the poems which at no great distance followed—­Paracelsus and Sordello.  Each is a study of the flaws which bring genius to all but ruin, a study of the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers.  In each poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises—­for Browning was not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven to warrant his optimistic creed—­rises at the close from failure to a spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it only for service in worlds other than ours which he may hereafter traverse.  He has been seduced or conquered by alien forces and through some inward flaw; he has been faithless to his highest faculties; he has not fulfilled his seeming destiny; yet before death and the darkness of death arrive, light has come; he perceives the wanderings of the way, and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited.  Shelley in Alastor, the influence of which on Browning in writing Pauline is evident, had rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty abstractions to the loss of human sympathy and human love.  Browning in Pauline also recognises this danger, but he indicates others—­the risk of the lower faculties of the mind encroaching upon and even displacing the higher, the risk of the spirit of aggrandisement, even in the world of the imagination, obtaining the mastery over the spirit of surrender to that which is higher than self.  It is quite right and needful to speak of the “lesson” of Browning’s poem, and the lesson of Pauline is designed to inculcate first loyalty to a man’s highest power, and secondly a worshipping loyalty and service to that which transcends himself, named by the speaker in Pauline by the old and simple name of God.

Was it the problem of his own life—­that concerning the conduct of high, intellectual and spiritual powers—­which Browning transferred to his art, creating personages other than himself to be exponents of his theme?  We cannot tell; but the problem in varied forms persists from poem to poem.  The poet imagined as twenty years of age, who makes his fragment of a confession in Pauline, is more than a poet; he is rather of the Sordello type than of the type represented in Eglamor and Aprile.[13] Through his imagination he would comprehend and possess all forms of life, of beauty, of joy in nature and in humanity; but he must also feel himself at the centre of these, the lord and master of his own perceptions and creations; and yet, at the same time, this man is made for the worship and service of a power higher than self.  How is such a nature as this to attain its true ends?  What are its special dangers?