It is quite certain that neither Shakspere nor Milton ever met with such enthusiastic praise and welcome as Browning encountered on the publication of “Pauline” and “Paracelsus.”  Shelley, as far above Browning in poetic music as the author of so many parleyings with other people’s souls is the superior in psychic insight and intellectual strength, had throughout his too brief life not one such review of praiseful welcome as the Rev. W.J.  Fox wrote on the publication of “Pauline” (or, it may be added, as Allan Cunningham’s equally kindly but less able review in the Athenaeum), or as John Forster wrote in The Examiner concerning “Paracelsus,” and later in the New Monthly Magazine, where he had the courage to say of the young and quite unknown poet, “without the slightest hesitation we name Mr. Robert Browning at once with Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth.”  His plays even (which are commonly said to have “fallen flat”) were certainly not failures.  There is something effeminate, undignified, and certainly uncritical, in this confusion as to what is and what is not failure in literature.  So enthusiastic was the applause he encountered, indeed, that had his not been too strong a nature to be thwarted by adulation any more than by contemptuous neglect, he might well have become spoilt—­so enthusiastic, that were it not for the heavy and prolonged counterbalancing dead weight of public indifference, a huge amorphous mass only of late years moulded into harmony with the keenest minds of the century, we might well be suspicious of so much and long-continued eulogium, and fear the same reversal of judgment towards him on the part of those who come after us as we ourselves have meted to many an one among the high gods of our fathers.

Fortunately the deep humanity of his work in the mass conserves it against the mere veerings of taste.  A reaction against it will inevitably come; but this will pass:  what, in the future, when the unborn readers of Browning will look back with clear eyes untroubled by the dust of our footsteps, not to subside till long after we too are dust, will be the place given to this poet, we know not, nor can more than speculatively estimate.  That it will, however, be a high one, so far as his weightiest (in bulk, it may possibly be but a relatively slender) accomplishment is concerned, we may rest well assured:  for indeed “It lives, If precious be the soul of man to man.”

So far as has been ascertained there were only three reviews or notices of “Pauline”:  the very favourable article by Mr. Fox in the Monthly Repository, the kindly paper by Allan Cunningham in the Athenaeum, and, in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, the succinctly expressed impression of either an indolent or an incapable reviewer:  “Pauline; a Fragment of a Confession; a piece of pure bewilderment”—­a “criticism” which anticipated and thus prevented the insertion of a highly favourable review which John Stuart Mill voluntarily wrote.