yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his strength in ineffectual efforts, and he is conscious of lamentable failure and mistake in the course of his past life.  Specially does he recognise and mourn his “self-idolatry,” which has isolated him from others, and confined him within the close and vitiated circle of his own selfhood.  Led by some better impulse, he now turns to Pauline, and to the memory of a great and dearly-loved poet, spoken of as “Sun-treader,” finding in these, the memory and the love, a quietude and a redemption.

The poet of the poem is an imaginary character, but it is possible to trace in this character some real traits of its creator.  The passage beginning “I am made up of an intensest life” is certainly a piece of admirable self-portraiture; allusions here and there have a personal significance.  In this earliest poem we see the germ of almost all the qualities (humour excepted) which mark Browning’s mature work.  Intensity of religious belief, love of music, of painting, and of the Greek classics; insight into nature, a primary interest in and intense insight into the human soul, these are already manifest.  No characteristic is more interesting in the light of long subsequent achievement than the familiarity with Greek literature, shown not merely by the references to Plato and to Agamemnon, but by what is perhaps the finest passage in the poem, the one ending:—­

      “Yet I say, never morn broke clear as those
      On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
      The deep groves and white temples and wet caves: 
      And nothing ever will surprise me now—­
      Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
      Who bound my forehead with Proserpine’s hair.”

The enthusiasm which breathes through whole pages of address to the “Sun-treader” gives no exaggerated picture of Browning’s love and reverence for Shelley, whose Alastor might perhaps in some respects be compared with Pauline.  The rhythm of Browning’s poem has a certain echo in it of Shelley’s earlier blank verse; and the lyrically emotional descriptions and the vivid and touching metaphors derived from nature frequently remind us of Shelley, and sometimes of Keats.  On every page we meet with magical touches like this:—­

      “Thou wilt remember one warm morn when winter
      Crept aged from the earth, and spring’s first breath
      Blew soft from the moist hills; the black-thorn boughs,
      So dark in the bare wood, when glistening
      In the sunshine were white with coming buds,
      Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
      Had violets opening from sleep like eyes;”

with lines full of exquisite fancy, such as those on the woodland tarn:—­

                   “The trees bend
      O’er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl;”