heir spirit dwelt in me, and I
should rule."

Even then the poet's inner life was animated by his love of the
beautiful Greek literature. Telling how in "the first dawn of life,"
"which passed alone with wisest ancient books," Pauline's lover
incorporated himself in whatsoever he read--was the god wandering after
beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the
high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos--his
second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the
place, the time, the fashion of those lives." Never for him, then, had
there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of
the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric
awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty, nor sweet
nature's face"--

"Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea:
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves--
And nothing ever will surprise me now--
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."

Further, the allusion to Plato, and the more remote one to Agamemnon, the

"old lore
Loved for itself, and all it shows--the King
Treading the purple calmly to his death,"

and the beautiful Andromeda passage, afford ample indication of how
deeply Browning had drunk of that vital stream whose waters are the
surest conserver of the ideal loveliness which we all of us, in some
degree, cherish in various guises.

Yet, as in every long poem that he has written (and, it must be
admitted, in too many of the shorter pieces of his later period) there
is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry, so in "Pauline,"
written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the
inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages,
decasyllabically arranged. "Twas in my plan to look on real life, which
was all new to me; my theories were firm, so I left them, to look upon
men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as I
pondered on them all, I sought how best life's end might be attained, an
end comprising every joy." Again: "Then came a pause, and long restraint
chained down my soul, till it was changed. I lost myself, and were it
not that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned to
turn my mind against itself ... at len