he was laying, in an unsystematic but not ineffective way, the foundations of his many-sided culture and accomplishment.  We hear much of private tutors, of instruction in French, in music, in riding, fencing, boxing, dancing; of casual attendance also at the Greek classes in University College.  In all these matters he seems to have won more or less definite accomplishment, and from most of them his versatile literary talent took, at one time or another, an effective toll.  The athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop, was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before, the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of hoofs.

Of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in short that was going on under the surface of this brilliant and versatile Robert Browning of twenty, we have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment Pauline.  The quite peculiar animosity with which its author in later life regarded this single “crab” of his youthful tree of knowledge only adds to its interest.  He probably resented the frank expression of passion, nowhere else approached in his works.  Yet passion only agitates the surface of Pauline.  Whether Pauline herself stand for an actual woman—­Miss Flower or another—­or for the nascent spell of womanhood—­she plays, for one who is ostensibly the heroine of the poem, a discouragingly minor part.  No wonder she felt tempted to advise the burning of so unflattering a record.  Instead of the lyric language of love, she has to receive the confessions of a subtle psychologist, who must unlock the tumultuous story of his soul “before he can sing.”  And these confessions are of a kind rare even amongst self-revelations of genius.  Pauline’s lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an uncommon species.  He is preoccupied with the processes of his mind, but his mind ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is forced to recognise.  Mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of introspection, recognised with amazement the “intense self-consciousness” of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists through all its changing harmonies.  It is the self-consciousness of a soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to recognise a host of outer realities not itself, which it constantly strives to bring into relation with itself, as constantly baffled and thrown back by the obstinate objectivity of that outer world.  A pure dreamer would have “contentedly lived in a nut-shell and imagined himself king of infinite space”; a purely scientific intelligence would have applied himself to the patient mastery of facts; in the hero of Pauline the despotic senses and intellect of science and the imperious imagination of the poet appear to coexist and to contend, and he tosses to and fro in a fever of fitful efforts, continually frustrated, to find complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the intractable maze of being.  There had indeed been an earlier time when the visions of old poets had wholly sufficed him; and the verses in which he recalls them have almost the pellucid charm of Homer,—­