gth I was restored, yet long the
influence remained; and nought but the still life I led, apart from all,
which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e'er have brought me
thus far back to peace." No reader, alert to the subtle and haunting
music of rarefied blank verse (and unless it be rarefied it should not
be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as
expressionally poetical. It would seem as though, from the first,
Browning's ear was keener for the apprehension than for the sustained
evocation of the music of verse. Some flaw there was, somewhere. His
heart, so to say, beat too fast, and the singing in his ears from the
o'er-fevered blood confused the serene rhythm haunting the far
perspectives of the brain, "as Arab birds float sleeping in the wind."

I have dwelt at this length upon "Pauline" partly because of its
inherent beauty and autopsychical significance, and partly because it is
the least familiar of Browning's poems, long overshadowed as it has been
by his own too severe strictures: mainly, however, because of its
radical importance to the student who would arrive at a broad and true
estimate of the power and scope and shaping constituents of its author's
genius. Almost every quality of his after-verse may be found here, in
germ or outline. It is, in a word, more physiognomic than any other
single poem by Browning, and so must ever possess a peculiar interest
quite apart from its many passages of haunting beauty.

To these the lover of poetry will always turn with delight. Some will
even regard them retrospectively with alien emotion to that wherewith
they strive to possess their souls in patience over some one or other of
the barbarisms, the Titanic excesses, the poetic banalities recurrent in
the later volumes.

How many and how haunting these delicate oases are! Those who know and
love "Pauline" will remember the passage where the poet, with that
pantheistic ecstasy which was possibly inspired by the singer he most
loved, tells how he can live the life of plants, content to watch the
wild bees flitting to and fro, or to lie absorbent of the ardours of the
sun, or, like the night-flowering columbine, to trail up the tree-trunk
and through its rustling foliage "look for the dim stars;" or, again,
can live the life of the bird, "leaping airily his pyramid of leaves and
twisted boughs of some tall mountain-tree;" or be a fish, breathing the
morning air in the misty sun-warm water.