ith men and foreign
literatures.

By this time the poet was twenty. His youth had been uneventful; in a
sense, more so than his boyhood. His mind, however, was rapidly
unfolding, and great projects were casting a glory about the coming
days. It was in his nineteenth year, I have been told on good authority,
that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty, a year or
two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly, no inappropriate lover
for this wooer. Why and when this early passion came to a close, or was
rudely interrupted, is not known. What is certain is that it made a deep
impression on the poet's mind. It may be that it, of itself, or wrought
to a higher emotion by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of
"Pauline," that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of Browning's
genius.

It was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all
freely of his youthful life. Perhaps the earliest record of these
utterances is that which appeared in the _Century Magazine_ in 1881.
From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times
and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac, after
years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast the Titanic
range of the _Comedie Humaine_, Browning planned "a series of
monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls--a gigantic
scheme at which a Victor Hugo or a Lope de Vega would start back
aghast."

Already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul in its
manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least there
was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion. In a sense he has
fulfilled this early dream: at any rate we have a unique series of
monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls. In another sense, the
major portion of Browning's life-work is, collectively, one monodramatic
"epic." He is himself a type of the subtle, restless, curious, searching
modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter. Through a
multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks, and delivers himself of
a message which could not be presented emphatically enough as the
utterance of a single individual. He is a true dramatic poet, though not
in the sense in which Shakspere is. Shakspere and his kindred project
themselves into the lives of their imaginary personages: Browning pays
little heed to external life, or to the exigencies of action, and
projects himself into the minds of