special pleading is metrical prose, with most occasional gleams of poetry. Browning's later characters are too eager to 'try conclusions' with their outside adversary or inner tempter, too intent to read their title clear' to theism and immortality, in a word, too argumentative for poetic creations. Though Browning reached his high-water mark in the vital monologues of The Ring and the Book, his short poems, such as are to be found in the volumes of Selections, contain his most flawless poetry. To cover his work, and not only account for special portions of it, it must e'en be conceded that truth is more to Browning than beauty. What is this but saying that the man is greater than the artist? Truly, a brave sin, and one which more than ever confirms the sense of unity in Browning's personality and all its output. Browning's poetics manifest a temporary decline in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Fifine at the Fair, and Aristophanes' Apology. These books are thorny reading, and in them, and more especially in Red Cotton Night- Cap Country, Browning's passion for strange backwaters of character takes him among that which is morally ugly and even worthless. Browning's optimism is a stumbling-block to some readers, and certainly it does not leave him much room for ultimate pathos. Whether, in this, Browning does well or ill depends on whether his root belief, that no failure is final, be well founded or no.

is wider than a criticism of Browning.

The question

CHAPTER III.

INTRODUCTIONS TO THE POEMS.

Pauline; A Fragment of a Confession, 1833 (Vol. I.), was the first work Browning gave the world. In conformity with an intention of youth, he issued it anonymously. The word 'Richmond,' added to the date at the end, was a fiction, intended. to baffle readers. Pauline was not included among Browning's works till the edition of 1868, when, for necessary reasons, 'with extreme repugnance' he acknowledged and retained it. He made some slight corrections for the 1888 edition. Pauline, by an unknown poet, met with little general notice. Two great men, separate enough, Stuart Mill and Dante Rossetti, were much struck by it, Rossetti divining that the writer of Pauline was the Browning of Paracelsus. The motto from the old French of Clément Marot, "I am no longer-I could never be again-what I was," is the burden of the 'Confession.' The preface of Cornelius Agrippa suggests that Browning cared to 'half reveal and half conceal' a partial identity between his own youthful mind and the mind of the young poet who is supposed to be speaking—or writing-throughout. 'Pauline' herself only speaks once, as supposed editress of the

E

fragment, in a prose note in French. She is represented by the poet as a wise, calm friend, unfailing in her devotion to him, forgiving the inconstancy and degradation he has previously confessed to her, for a former confession is referred to (pp. 5, 6), the result of which emboldens this one. If we were to take dramatically Pauline's note, in which she speaks of her 'pauvre ami' in a tone of pitying patronage, her calm would be more apparent than her love, but the note, with its very just criticism, is in fact Browning's, not 'Pauline's.' As a foretaste of the sanity and reflectiveness of Browning's genius, it is extremely interesting. It shows the youth of twenty, looking at his just written poem, and even then recognising its indistinctness, fitfulness, and lack of balance. Throughout the Confession, the young poet's vivid imagination of Pauline makes him address her as if she, with her 'soft breast' and 'sweet eyes,' were listening to his words, though he is really alone, writing what she is to read (see Pauline's note, p. 36). The chief things the poet has to confess are the faults of a genius ahead of moral judgment. He records no incidents, only the phases of thought and feeling which underlay action, or were in great part their own end, for he exaggerates his faults, and is abnormally sensitive about merely imaginative sins -perhaps, after all, as 'real' to this typical idealist as matter-of-fact offences. Excess of imagination combined with moral wavering (p. 42), self-absorption, restless craving after unattainable joy and

beauty, have driven his now exhausted mind into every untenable extreme. He bitterly regrets his loss of the freshness of youth (p. 8), his powers of concentration foregone (pp. 27, 28), his aimless, truthless, unloving state. He sadly tells Pauline how, lured by beauty in strange eyes, he has broken his allegiance. Much of his experience resembles that of Paracelsus and Sordello. He is a sketch for their finished portraits. Like Paracelsus, he craves for knowledge (p. 28), and for a time makes that his god. Still more like Aprile, and with the same artistic and poetic temperament, he forsakes duty to follow after loveliness. Most like Sordello, in his 'first dawn of life' he fancies himself all the bright heroes of childhood (p. 16), and, grown man, resembles him in despair of translating his passion and insight into any form that can influence the many (pp. 19-25), and so essays to be himself his All-in-all (p. 31). Like those other three, the mind of this first of Browning's characters clears again (pp. 39, 40, 45). Through all his wanderings, he never loses sight of some fixed stars. His 'yearning after God' (pp. 15, 37), partly obscured by a fatuous fatalism (p. 15), never dies, and he longs to see and be loved by Christ (p. 38). Then, too, introductory to the beautiful address in which Browning glorifies Shelley under the title of 'Sun-treader' (pp. 9, 10, 11), the poet says

"the glow I felt at HIS (i.e. Shelley's) award Assured me all was not extinct within."

He speaks of first poetic efforts being half original, half imitative (p. 19), and the reader hears echoes of Shelley in various lines. The poem closes with an invocation to him. At that time Browning was

steeped in Shelley. He has always expressed intense admiration for the earlier poet, the most aerial charming the most indubitably human! Music is another voice that appealed to Pauline's lover. In this first work, Browning speaks of music (p. 18) as the one language of innermost soul, not mind, exactly as in Abt Vogler (1864) and Charles Avison (1887). One speaks advisedly of Browning's continuous unity of thought and purpose! Again, the poet speaks of the limitless dreams opened to him by Plato (p. 20), but at the failure (p. 21) of such hopes of life's perfectibility he denies all goodness (p. 22). This dark mood is too foreign to his nature to last. Beauty and desire are stronger temptations than negation to this poet as typical as Keats. Browning's intense susceptibility to the charm of Greek life and myth are as marked in Pauline as ever later. Whenever, even in his most analytic years, Browning approaches Hellas, he becomes simpler and more direct, his hand to a perceptible extent subdued to what it works in. That cameo, the passage that describes Andromeda (pp. 29, 30), would grace the finest anthology. The lines referring to Agamemnon, Ajax, and Orestes (p. 26), and the 'pale sister,' Antigone (p. 43) are equally poetical. Separated in subject, yet akin in interpenetrative