justified in asserting what is beyond dispute: that these poems
represent an introductory phase of the author's imagination, one which
begins and ends in them. The mind of his men and women will be exercised
on many things, but never again so much upon itself. The vivid sense of
their personality will be less in their minds than in his own.

"PAULINE." (1832.)

This poem is, as its title declares, a fragment of a confession. The
speaker is a man, probably still young; and Pauline, the name of the
lady who receives the confession, and is supposed to edit it. It is not,
however, "fragmentary" in the sense of revealing only a small part of
the speaker's life, or of only recording isolated acts, from which the
life may be built up. Its fragmentary character lies in this: that,
while very explicit as a record of feeling and motive, it is entirely
vague in respect to acts. It is an elaborate retrospect of successive
mental states, big with the sense of corresponding misdeeds; and
pointing among these to some glaring infidelities to Pauline, the man's
constant love and friend; but on the whole conveying nothing beyond an
impression of youthful excesses, and of an extreme and fantastic
self-consciousness which has inspired these excesses, and which now
magnifies and distorts them.

An ultra-consciousness of self is in fact the key-note of the whole
mental situation. Pauline's lover has been a prey to the spiritual
ambition so distinctly illustrated in these three first poems; and,
unlike Paracelsus and Sordello, he has given it no outlet in unselfish
aims. His life has not been wholly misspent; he is a poet and a student;
he has had dreams of human good; he has reverenced great men: and never
quite lost the faith in God, and the sense of nearness to Him; and he
alleges some of these facts in deprecation of his too harsh verdict upon
himself. But his ultimate object has been always the gratification of
Self--the ministering to its pleasures and to its powers; and this
egotism has become narrower and more consuming, till the thirst for even
momentary enjoyment has banished the very belief in higher things. The
belief returns, and we leave him at the close of his confession
exhausted by the mental fever, but released from it--new-born to a
better life; though how and why this has happened is again part of the
mystery of the case. "Pauline" is _the_ one of Mr. Browning's longer
poems of which no intelligible abstract is possibl