to be read for its own sake.  It is an interesting document in the history of its author’s mind.  It gives promises and pledges which were redeemed in full.  It shows what dropped away from the poet and what, being an essential part of his equipment, was retained.  It exhibits his artistic method in the process of formation.  It sets forth certain leading thoughts which are dominant in his later work.  The first considerable production of a great writer must always claim attention from the student of his mind and art.

The poem is a study in what Browning in his Fifine terms “mental analysis”; it attempts to shadow forth, through the fluctuating moods of the dying man, a series of spiritual states.  The psychology is sometimes crude; subtle, but clumsily subtle; it is, however, essentially the writer’s own.  To construe clearly the states of mind which are adumbrated rather than depicted is difficult, for Browning had not yet learnt to manifest his generalised conceptions through concrete details, to plunge his abstractions in reality.  The speaker in the poem tells us that he “rudely shaped his life to his immediate wants”; this is intelligible, yet only vaguely intelligible, for we do not know what were these wants, and we do not see any rude shaping of his life.  We are told of “deeds for which remorse were vain”; what were these deeds? did he, like Bunyan, play cat on Sunday, or join the ringers of the church bells?  “Instance, instance,” we cry impatiently.  And so the story remains half a shadow.  The poem is dramatic, yet, like so much of Browning’s work, it is not pure drama coming from profound sympathy with a spirit other than the writer’s own; it is only hybrid drama, in which the dramatis persona thinks and moves and acts under the necessity of expounding certain ideas of the poet.  Browning’s puppets are indeed too often in his earlier poems moved by intellectual wires; the hands are the hands of Luria or Djabal, but the voice is the showman’s voice.  A certain intemperance in the pursuit of poetic beauty, strange and lovely imagery which obscures rather than interprets, may be regarded as in Pauline the fault or the glory of youth; a young heir arrived at his inheritance will scatter gold pieces.  The verse has caught something of its affluent flow, its wavelike career, wave advancing upon wave, from Shelley: 

    ’Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait;
    He rises on the toe; that spirit of his
    In aspiration lifts him from the earth.

The aspiration in Browning’s later verse is a complex of many forces; here it is a simple poetic enthusiasm.