e thick, damp, rotting leaves, and this spring some one found a
delicate exotic-looking plant, growing wild on the very spot, with
'Pauline' hanging from its slender stalk. Unripe fruit it may be, but of
pleasant flavour and promise, and a mellower produce, it may be hoped,
will follow.'

* Mr. Browning's copy of 'Rosalind and Helen', which he had lent
to Miss Flower, and which she lost in this wood on a picnic.
This and a bald though well-meant notice in the 'Athenaeum'
exhaust its literary history for this period.*

* Not quite, it appears. Since I wrote the above words,
Mr. Dykes Campbell has kindly copied for me the following extract
from the 'Literary Gazette' of March 23, 1833:

'Pauline: a Fragment of a Confession', pp. 71. London, 1833.
Saunders and Otley.

'Somewhat mystical, somewhat poetical, somewhat sensual,
and not a little unintelligible,--this is a dreamy volume,
without an object, and unfit for publication.'

The anonymity of the poem was not long preserved; there was no reason
why it should be. But 'Pauline' was, from the first, little known or
discussed beyond the immediate circle of the poet's friends; and when,
twenty years later, Dante Gabriel Rossetti unexpectedly came upon it
in the library of the British Museum, he could only surmise that it had
been written by the author of 'Paracelsus'.

The only recorded event of the next two years was Mr. Browning's
visit to Russia, which took place in the winter of 1833-4. The Russian
consul-general, Mr. Benckhausen, had taken a great liking to him, and
being sent to St. Petersburg on some special mission, proposed that
he should accompany him, nominally in the character of secretary.
The letters written to his sister during this, as during every other
absence, were full of graphic description, and would have been a mine
of interest for the student of his imaginative life. They are,
unfortunately, all destroyed, and we have only scattered reminiscences
of what they had to tell; but we know how strangely he was impressed
by some of the circumstances of the journey: above all, by the endless
monotony of snow-covered pine-forest, through which he and his companion
rushed for days and nights at the speed of six post-horses, without
seeming to move from one spot. He enjoyed the society of St. Petersburg,
and was fortunate enough, before his return, to witness the breaking-up
of the