ve in a girl!"

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! But observe that
he has to utter the _true_ word.

+ + + + +

This brave and joyous note is the essential Browning, and to me it
supplies an easy explanation for his much-discussed rejection of the
very early poem _Pauline_, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he
never in later life cared at all--more, he wished to suppress it. In
_Pauline_, his deepest sense of woman's spiritual function is falsified.
This might be accounted for by the fact that it was written at
twenty-one, if it were not that at twenty-one most young men are most
"original." Browning, in this as in other things, broke down tradition,
for _Pauline_ is by far the least original of his works in outlook--it
is, indeed, in outlook, of the purest common-place. "It exhibits," says
Mr. Chesterton, "the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general
suggestion that the author is a thousand years old"; and it exhibits too
the entirely un-characteristic mark of a Browning poem, the general
suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which
he was, in the issue, almost to make his own--that of the inspiring, as
opposed (for in Browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the
consoling, power of a beloved woman. From the very first line this
emotional flaccidity is evident--

"Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me--thy soft breast
Shall pant to mine--bend o'er me--thy sweet eyes
And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms
Drawing me to thee--these build up a screen
To shut me in with thee, and from all fear . . ."

And again in the picture of her, lovely to the sense, but, in some
strange fashion, hardly less than nauseating to the mind--

". . . Love looks through--
Whispers--E'en at the last I have her still,
With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven
When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist . . .
How the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread
As thinned by kisses! only in her lips
It wells and pulses like a living thing,
And her neck looks like marble misted o'er
With love-breath--a Pauline from heights above,
Stooping beneath me, looking up--one look
As I might kill her and be loved the more.
So love me--me, Pauline, and nought but me,
Never leave loving! . . ."

Something is there to which not again, not