sketch," entirely lacking in good draughtsmanship and right handling.
For the edition of twenty years later, 1888, he revised and corrected
_Pauline_ without re-handling it to any considerable extent. In truth
_Pauline_ is a poem from which Browning ought not to have desired to
detach his mature self. Rarely does a poem by a writer so young deserve
better 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