If he content himself with the exercise of the subordinate faculties, intellectual dexterity, wit, social charm and mastery, he is lost; if he should place himself at the summit, and cease to worship and to love, he is lost.  He 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 succeeded the wreck of his early faith and early hopes inspired by the voice of Shelley—­the revolutionary faith in liberty, equality and human perfectibility.  Wordsworth in The Prelude—­unpublished when Browning wrote Pauline—­which is also the history of a poet’s mind, has described