“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 black-thorn 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.”

If we have an imaginary Browning, a Shelleyan phantasm, in

“I seemed the fate from which I fled; I felt
A strange delight in causing my decay;
I was a fiend, in darkness chained for ever
Within some ocean-wave:” 

we have the real Browning in

“So I will sing on—­fast as fancies come
Rudely—­the verse being as the mood it paints.
* * * * *
I am made up of an intensest life,”

and all the succeeding lines down to “Their spirit dwelt in me, and I should rule.”

Even then the poet’s inner life was animated by his love of the beautiful Greek literature.  Telling how in “the first dawn of life,” “which passed alone with wisest ancient books,” Pauline’s lover incorporated himself in whatsoever he read—­was the god wandering after beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos—­his second-self cries, “I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the place, the time, the fashion of those lives.”  Never for him, then, had there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric awakening flash from “work of lofty art, nor woman’s beauty, nor sweet nature’s face”—­

“Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea: 
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves—­
And nothing ever will surprise me now—­
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine’s hair.”

Further, the allusion to Plato, and the more remote one to Agamemnon, the

                                      “old lore
      Loved for itself, and all it shows—­the King
      Treading the purple calmly to his death,”

and the beautiful Andromeda passage, afford ample indication of how deeply Browning had drunk of that vital stream whose waters are the surest conserver of the ideal loveliness which we all of us, in some degree, cherish in various guises.

Yet, as in every long poem that he has written (and, it must be admitted, in too many of the shorter pieces of his later period) there is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry, so in “Pauline,” written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages, decasyllabically arranged.  “Twas in my plan to look on real life, which