An Introduction to the Study of Browning

d) in Poetical Works, 6 vols., Smith, Elder and Co., 1868 (Vol. I.

t the "confession" is dramatic, and at the same time lays claim to the indulgence due to the author's youth. These two points are stated plainly in the "

cheme less extravagant and scale less impracticable than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch-a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of th

llected edition of

s remain duly recorded against me, and I claim permission to somewhat dimin

are indeed "diminished," it is difficult not to feel

od. The difficulty is acknowledged in a curious "editor's" note, written in French, and signed "Pauline," in which Browning offered a sort of explanatory criticism of his own work. So far as we can grasp his personality, the speaker appears to us a highly-gifted and on the whole right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good

e. 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 sou

ver morn broke

stered isles i

and white temple

ever will su

ide the naked

rehead with Pro

t 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 descr

mber one warm m

he earth, and spr

moist hills; the

e bare wood,

e were white w

side of a sorr

ening from sle

site fancy, such as thos

trees

d men watch a

it is, indeed, far from mature, but it has a superb precocity marking a certain stage of ripeness. It is lacking, certainly, as Browning himself declares, in "good draughtsmanship and right handling," but this def