come, by
the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by
legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden
him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of
failure more rare and more brilliant than that of Eglamor, yet more full
of the irony of life.

In one sense, however, he had lived for a _better thing_, and we are
bidden look back, through the feverish years, on a bare-footed rosy
child running "higher and higher" up a wintry hillside still crisp with
the morning frost,

"... singing all the while
Some unintelligible words to beat
The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet,
So worsted is he...." (vol. i. p. 288-9)

The poet in him had failed with the man, but less completely.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: The quoted passage is from the works of Cornelius Agrippa,
a well-known professor of occult philosophy, and is indeed introductory
to a treatise upon it. The writer is quite aware that his work may be
scandalizing, hurtful, and even poisonous to narrow minds, but is sure
that readers of a superior understanding will get no little good, and
plenty of pleasure from it; and he concludes by claiming indulgence on
the score of his youth, in case he should have given even the better
judges any cause for offence. For those who read this preface with any
previous knowledge of Mr. Browning's life and character, there will be
an obvious inference to his own youthfulness in the exaggerated estimate
thus implied of his imaginative sins; for the tendency of "Pauline" is
both religious and moral; and no man has been more innocent than its
author, from boyhood up, of tampering with any belief in the black art.
His hatred for that "spiritualism," which is its modern equivalent, is
indeed matter of history. But the trick he has here played himself may
confuse the mind of those who only know him from his works, and for whom
his vivid belief in the supernatural may point to a different kind of
mysticism.]

[Footnote 9: Vol. i. of the new uniform edition of 1888-89. This will be
the one always referred to.]

[Footnote 10: The "Andromeda," described as "with" the speaker at pages
29 and 30, is that of Polidoro di Caravaggio, of which Mr. Browning
possesses an engraving, which was always before his eyes as he wrote his
earlier poems. The original was painted on the wall of a garden attached