his own experience of the loss of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair.  The poet of Pauline turns from political and social abstractions to real life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream; but his mood is not so sane as that of despair.  He falls back, with a certain joy, upon the exercise of his inferior powers; he wakes suddenly and “without heart-wreck “: 

    First went my hopes of perfecting mankind,
    Next—­faith in them, and then in freedom’s self
    And virtue’s self, then my own motives, ends,
    And aims and loves, and human love went last. 
    I felt this no decay, because new powers
    Rose as old feelings left—­wit, mockery,
    Light-heartedness; for I had oft been sad,
    Mistrusting my resolves, but now I cast
    Hope joyously away; I laughed and said
    “No more of this!”

It is difficult to believe that Browning is wholly dramatic here; we seem to discover something of that period of Sturm und Drang, when his mood grew restless and aggressive.  The homage paid to Shelley, whose higher influence Browning already perceived to be in large measure independent of his creed of revolution, has in it certainly something of the spirit of autobiography.  In this enthusiastic admiration for Shelley there is nothing to regret, except the unhappy extravagance of the name “Suntreader,” which he invented as a title for the poet of Alastor and Prometheus Unbound.

The attention of Mr W.J.  Fox, a Unitarian minister of note, had been directed to Browning’s early unpublished verse by Miss Flower.  In the Monthly Repository (April 1833) which he then edited, Mr Fox wrote of Pauline with admiration, and Browning was duly grateful for this earliest public recognition of his genius as a poet.  In the Athenaeum Allen Cunningham made an effort to be appreciative and sympathetic.  John Stuart Mill desired to be the reviewer of Pauline in Taifs Magazine; there, however, the poem had been already dismissed with one contemptuous phrase.  It found few readers, but the admiration of one of these, who discovered Pauline many years later, was a sufficient compensation for the general indifference or neglect.  “When Mr Browning was living in Florence, he received a letter from a young painter whose name was quite unknown to him, asking him whether he were the author of a poem called Pauline, which was somewhat in his manner, and which the writer had so greatly admired that he had transcribed the whole of it in the British Museum reading-room.  The letter was signed D.G.  Rossetti, and thus began Mr Browning’s acquaintance with this eminent man."[14]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  By Dr Furnivall; see The Academy, April 12, 1902.]