Earn the means first.  God surely will contrive
      Use for our earning. 
    Others mistrust, and say:  “But time escapes;
      Live now or never!”
    He said, “What’s time?  Leave Now for dogs and apes! 
      Man has Forever.”

    A Grammarian’s Funeral.

This is a sketch of his explanation of life.  The expression of it began in Pauline.  Had that poem been as imitative, as poor as the first efforts of poets usually are, we might leave it aside.  But though, as he said, “good draughtsmanship and right handling were far beyond the artist at that time,” though “with repugnance and purely of necessity” he republished it, he did republish it; and he was right.  It was crude and confused, but the stuff in it was original and poetic; wonderful stuff for a young man.

The first design of it was huge. Pauline is but a fragment of a poem which was to represent, not one but various types of human life.  It became only the presentation of the type of the poet, the first sketch of the youth of Sordello.  The other types conceived were worked up into other poems.

The hero in Pauline hides in his love for Pauline from a past he longed to forget.  He had aspired to the absolute beauty and goodness, and the end was vanity and vexation.  The shame of this failure beset him from the past, and the failure was caused because he had not been true to the aspirations which took him beyond himself.  When he returned to self, the glory departed.  And a fine simile of his soul as a young witch whose blue eyes,

    As she stood naked by the river springs,
    Drew down a God,

who, as he sat in the sunshine on her knees singing of heaven, saw the mockery in her eyes and vanished, tells of how the early ravishment departed, slain by self-scorn that followed on self-worship.  But one love and reverence remained—­that for Shelley, the Sun-treader, and kept him from being “wholly lost.”  To strengthen this one self-forgetful element, the love of Pauline enters in, and the new impulse brings back something of the ancient joy.  “Let me take it,” he cries, “and sing on again

                fast as fancies come;
    Rudely, the verse being as the mood it paints,”—­

a line which tells us how Browning wished his metrical movement to be judged.  This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of life—­the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh uncontentment.  God has sent a new impulse from without; let me begin again.

Then, in the new light, he strips his mind bare.  What am I?  What have I done?  Where am I going?

The first element in his soul, he thinks, is a living personality, linked to a principle of restlessness,

    Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.