I begin, therefore, with Pauline.  The descriptions of nature in that poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in Browning’s poetry.  The first of them faintly recalls the manner of Shelley in the Alastor, and I have no doubt was influenced by him.  The two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from Shelley, and are almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their detail.  Yet all the three are original, not imitative.  They suggest Shelley and Keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of these poets that they suggest.  Browning became instantly original in this as in other modes of poetry.  It was characteristic of him from the beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings.

From one point of view this was full of treasureable matter for us.  It is not often the gods give us so opulent an originality.  From another point of view it was unfortunate.  If he had begun by imitating a little; if he had studied the excellences of his predecessors more; if he had curbed his individuality sufficiently to mark, learn and inwardly digest the noble style of others in natural description, and in all other matters of poetry as well, his work would have been much better than it is; his original excellences would have found fitter and finer expression; his faults would have been enfeebled instead of being developed; his style would have been more concise on one side, less abrupt on another, and we should not have been wrongly disturbed by obscurities of diction and angularities of expression.  He would have reached more continuously the splendid level he often attained.  This is plentifully illustrated by his work on external nature, but less perhaps than by his work on humanity.

The first natural description he published is in the beginning of Pauline: 

    Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
    Crept aged from the earth, and spring’s first breath
    Blew soft from the moist hills; the blackthorn boughs,
    So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
    In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
    Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
    Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.

That is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have been better.  We know what he means, but his words do not accurately or imaginatively convey this meaning.  The best lines are the first three, but the peculiar note of Shelley sighs so fully in them that they do not represent Browning.  What is special in them is his peculiar delight not only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring.  It was in his nature, even in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment.  Unlike Tennyson, who was old when he was old, Browning was young when he was old.  Only once in Asolando, in one poem, can we trace that he felt winter in his heart.  And the lines in Pauline which I now quote, spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old: