h induced him to do so. The poem is boyish, or at all events
youthful, in point of conception; and we need not wonder that this
intellectual crudeness should have outweighed its finished poetic
beauties in its author's mind. It contains however one piece of mental
portraiture which, with slight modifications, might have stood for Mr.
Browning when he re-edited the work, as it clearly did when he wrote it.
It begins thus (vol. i. page 14):

"I am made up of an intensest life,"

The tribute at page 14[9] to the saving power of imagination is also
characteristic of his maturer mind, though expressed in an ambiguous
manner. It is interesting to know that in the line (page 26),

"the king
Treading the purple calmly to his death,"

he was thinking of Agamemnon: as this shows how early his love of
classic literature began. The allusion to Plato, at pages 19, 20, and
21, largely confirms this impression. The feeling for music asserts
itself also at page 18, though in a less spiritual form than it assumes
in his later works. But the most striking piece of true biography which
"Pauline" contains, is its evidence of the young writer's affectionate
reverence for Shelley, whom he idealizes under the name of Sun-treader.
An invocation to his memory occupies three pages, beginning with the
ninth; it is renewed at the end of the poem, and there can be no doubt
that the pathetic language in which it is couched came straight from the
young poet's own heart. We even fancy that Shelley's influence is
visible in the poem itself, which contains a profusion of natural
imagery, and some touches of naturalistic emotion, not at all in keeping
with Mr. Browning's picturesque, but habitually human genius. The
influence, if it existed, passed away with his earliest youth; not so
the admiration and sympathy which it implied; and this, considering the
wide difference which separated the two minds, is an interesting
fact.[10]

"PARACELSUS." (1835.)

"Paracelsus" is a summary of the life, as Mr. Browning conceives it, of
this well-known physicist of the sixteenth century; and is divided into
five scenes, or groups of scenes, each representing a critical moment in
his experience, and reviewing in his own words the circumstances by
which it has been prepared. The personages whom it includes are, besides
the principal one, Festus and Michal, early friends of Paracelsus, and
now man and wife; and the I