was all new to me; my theories were firm, so I left them, to look upon men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as I pondered on them all, I sought how best life’s end might be attained, an end comprising every joy.”  Again:  “Then came a pause, and long restraint chained down my soul, till it was changed.  I lost myself, and were it not that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned to turn my mind against itself ... at length I was restored, yet long the influence remained; and nought but the still life I led, apart from all, which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e’er have brought me thus far back to peace.”  No reader, alert to the subtle and haunting music of rarefied blank verse (and unless it be rarefied it should not be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as expressionally poetical.  It would seem as though, from the first, Browning’s ear was keener for the apprehension than for the sustained evocation of the music of verse.  Some flaw there was, somewhere.  His heart, so to say, beat too fast, and the singing in his ears from the o’er-fevered blood confused the serene rhythm haunting the far perspectives of the brain, “as Arab birds float sleeping in the wind.”

I have dwelt at this length upon “Pauline” partly because of its inherent beauty and autopsychical significance, and partly because it is the least familiar of Browning’s poems, long overshadowed as it has been by his own too severe strictures:  mainly, however, because of its radical importance to the student who would arrive at a broad and true estimate of the power and scope and shaping constituents of its author’s genius.  Almost every quality of his after-verse may be found here, in germ or outline.  It is, in a word, more physiognomic than any other single poem by Browning, and so must ever possess a peculiar interest quite apart from its many passages of haunting beauty.

To these the lover of poetry will always turn with delight.  Some will even regard them retrospectively with alien emotion to that wherewith they strive to possess their souls in patience over some one or other of the barbarisms, the Titanic excesses, the poetic banalities recurrent in the later volumes.

How many and how haunting these delicate oases are!  Those who know and love “Pauline” will remember the passage where the poet, with that pantheistic ecstasy which was possibly inspired by the singer he most loved, tells how he can live the life of plants, content to watch the wild bees flitting to and fro, or to lie absorbent of the ardours of the sun, or, like the night-flowering columbine, to trail up the tree-trunk and through its rustling foliage “look for the dim stars;” or, again, can live the life of the bird, “leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and twisted boughs of some tall mountain-tree;” or be a fish, breathing the morning air in the misty sun-warm water.  Close following this is another memorable passage, that beginning “Night, and one single ridge of narrow path;” which has a particular interest for two notes of a deeper and broader music to be evolved long afterwards.  For, as it seems to me, in