There is a vagueness of outline about the speaker
which is due partly, no doubt, to the immaturity of the writer, partly
also to the too exclusive portraiture of inactive mood. The difficulty
is acknowledged in a curious "editor's" note, written in French, and
signed "Pauline," in which Browning offered a sort of explanatory
criticism of his own work. So far as we can grasp his personality, the
speaker appears to us a highly-gifted and on the whole right-natured
man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet
indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without,
as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a
passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has
spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious
of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life.
Specially does he recognise and mourn his "self-idolatry," which has
isolated him from others, and confined him within the close and vitiated
circle of his own selfhood. Led by some better impulse, he now turns to
Pauline, and to the memory of a great and dearly-loved poet, spoken of
as "Sun-treader," finding in these, the memory and the love, a quietude
and a redemption.

The poet of the poem is an imaginary character, but it is possible to
trace in this character some real traits of its creator. The passage
beginning "I am made up of an intensest life" is certainly a piece of
admirable self-portraiture; allusions here and there have a personal
significance. In this earliest poem we see the germ of almost all the
qualities (humour excepted) which mark Browning's mature work. Intensity
of religious belief, love of music, of painting, and of the Greek
classics; insight into nature, a primary interest in and intense insight
into the human soul, these are already manifest. No characteristic is
more interesting in the light of long subsequent achievement than the
familiarity with Greek literature, shown not merely by the references to
Plato and to Agamemnon, but by what is perhaps the finest passage in the
poem, the one ending:--

"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."

The enthusiasm which breathe