“Never morn broke clear as those
      On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
      The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves.”

But growing intellect demanded something more.  Shelley, the “Sun-treader,” weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture “from his poet’s station between both,” did much to sustain him; Plato’s more explicit and systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger assurance.  But disillusion broke in:  “Suddenly, without heart-wreck I awoke; I said, ’twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!” Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh.  He steeps himself in the concrete vitality of things, lives in imagination through “all life where it is most alive,” immerses himself in all that is most beautiful and intense in Nature, so fulfilling, it might seem, his passionate craving to “be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all,”—­yet only to feel that satisfaction is not here: 

     “My soul saddens when it looks beyond: 
      I cannot be immortal, taste all joy;”

only the sickness of satiety.  But when all joy was tasted, what then?  If there was any “crowning” state, it could only be, thought Browning, one in which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity of God.

Such seem to be the outlines of the mental history which passes before us, brilliant and incoherent as a dream, in Pauline.  The material, vast and many-sided as it is, is not fully mastered; but there is nothing merely imitative; it is everywhere Browning, and no mere disciple of Shelley or another, who is palpably at work.  The influence of Shelley seems, indeed, to have been already outgrown when Pauline was written; Browning gloried in him and in his increasing fame, but he felt that his own aims and destiny were different.  Rossetti, a few years later, took Pauline to be the work of an unconscious pre-Raphaelite; and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the details to justify the error.  In the meantime many outward circumstances conspired to promote the “advance” which every line of it foretold.  His old mentor of the Incondita days, W.J.  Fox, in some sort a Browningite before Browning, reviewed Pauline in The Monthly Repository (April 1833) with generous but discerning praise.  This was the beginning of a warm friendship between the two, which ended only with Fox’s death.  It was founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no man living was better qualified to scatter the morbid films that clung about the expanding genius of young Browning than this robust and masculine critic and preacher.  A few months later came an event of which we know very little, but which at least did much to detach him from the limited horizons of Camberwell.  At the invitation of M. Benckhausen, Russian consul-general, Browning accompanied him, in the winter of 1833-34, on a special mission to