owning,
finds lovely utterance in the lines where Pauline's lover speaks of the
blood in her lips pulsing like a living thing, while her neck is as
"marble misted o'er with love-breath," and

"... her delicious eyes as clear as heaven,
When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist,
And clouds float white in the sun like broods of swans."

In the quotations I have made, and in others that might be selected
(_e.g._, "Her fresh eyes, and soft hair, and _lips which bleed like a
mountain berry_"), it is easy to note how intimate an observer of nature
the youthful poet was, and with what conscious but not obtrusive art he
brings forward his new and striking imagery. Browning, indeed, is the
poet of new symbols.

"Pauline" concludes with lines which must have been in the minds of many
on that sad day when the tidings from Venice sent a thrill of startled,
half-incredulous, bewildered pain throughout the English nations--

"Sun-treader, I believe in God, and truth,
And love; ...
... but chiefly when I die ...
All in whom this wakes pleasant thoughts of me,
Know my last state is happy--free from doubt,
Or touch of fear."

Never again was Browning to write a poem with such conceptive crudeness,
never again to tread the byways of thought so falteringly or so
negligently: but never again, perhaps, was he to show so much
over-rapturing joy in the world's loveliness, such Bacchic abandon to
the ideal beauty which the true poet sees glowing upon the forlornest
height and brooding in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. The
Browning who might have been is here: henceforth the Browning we know
and love stands unique among all the lords of song. But sometimes do we
not turn longingly, wonderingly at least, to the young Dionysos upon
whose forehead was the light of another destiny than that which
descended upon him? The Icelanders say there is a land where all the
rainbows that have ever been, or are yet to be, forever drift to and
fro, evanishing and reappearing, like immortal flowers of vapour. In
that far country, it may be, are also the unfulfilled dreams, the
visions too perfect to be fashioned into song, of the young poets who
have gained the laurel.

We close the little book lovingly:

"And I had dimly shaped my first attempt,
And many a thought did I build up on thought,
As the wild bee hangs cell to cell--in vain;
For I must still go on: m