With Browning there never could have been two sides to the question:  it were excusable, it were natural even, had his father wavered.  The outcome of their deliberations was that Robert’s further education should be obtained from travel, and intercourse with men and foreign literatures.

By this time the poet was twenty.  His youth had been uneventful; in a sense, more so than his boyhood.  His mind, however, was rapidly unfolding, and great projects were casting a glory about the coming days.  It was in his nineteenth year, I have been told on good authority, that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty, a year or two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly, no inappropriate lover for this wooer.  Why and when this early passion came to a close, or was rudely interrupted, is not known.  What is certain is that it made a deep impression on the poet’s mind.  It may be that it, of itself, or wrought to a higher emotion by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of “Pauline,” that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of Browning’s genius.

It was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all freely of his youthful life.  Perhaps the earliest record of these utterances is that which appeared in the Century Magazine in 1881.  From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac, after years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast the Titanic range of the Comedie Humaine, Browning planned “a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls—­a gigantic scheme at which a Victor Hugo or a Lope de Vega would start back aghast.”

Already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul in its manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least there was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion.  In a sense he has fulfilled this early dream:  at any rate we have a unique series of monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls.  In another sense, the major portion of Browning’s life-work is, collectively, one monodramatic “epic.”  He is himself a type of the subtle, restless, curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter.  Through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks, and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented emphatically enough as the utterance of a single individual.  He is a true dramatic poet, though not in the sense in which Shakspere is.  Shakspere and his kindred project themselves into the lives of their imaginary personages:  Browning pays little heed to external life, or to the exigencies of action, and projects himself into the minds of his characters.