cannot alter his own nature; he cannot ever renounce his
intense consciousness of self, nor even the claim of self to a certain
supremacy as the centre of its own sympathies and imaginings. So much is
inevitable, and is right. But if he be true to his calling as poet, he
will task his noblest faculty, will live in it, and none the less look
upward, in love, in humility, in the spirit of loyal service, in the
spirit of glad aspiration, to that Power which leans above him and has
set him his earthly task.

Such reduced to a colourless and abstract statement is the theme dealt
with in _Pauline_. The young poet, who, through a fading autumn evening,
lies upon his death-bed, has been faithless to his high calling, and yet
never wholly faithless. As the pallid light declines, he studies his own
soul, he reviews his past, he traces his wanderings from the way, and
all has become clear. He has failed for the uses of earth; but he
recognises in himself capacities and desires for which no adequate scope
could ever have been found in this life; and restored to the spirit of
love, of trust, by such love, such trust as he can give Pauline, he
cannot deny the witnessing audible within his own heart to a future life
which may redeem the balance of his temporal loss. The thought which
plays so large a part in Browning's later poetry is already present and
potent here.

Two incidents in the history of a soul--studied by the speaker under the
wavering lights of his hectic malady and fluctuating moods of
passion--are dealt with in a singularly interesting and original way. He
describes, with strange and beautiful imagery, the cynical, bitter
pleasure--few of us do not know it--which the intellectual faculties
sometimes derive from mocking and drawing down to their own level the
spiritual powers, the intuitive powers, which are higher than they,
higher, yet less capable of justification or verification by the common
tests of sense and understanding. The witchcraft of the brain degrades
the god in us:

And then I was a young witch whose blue eyes,
As she stood naked by the river springs,
Drew down a god: I watched his radiant form
Growing less radiant, and it gladdened me.

What he presents with such intensity of imaginative power Browning must
have known--even if it were but for moments--by experience. And again,
there is impressive truth and originality in the description of the
state of the poet's mind which succeed