He has been seduced or conquered by alien forces and through some inward
flaw; he has been faithless to his highest faculties; he has not
fulfilled his seeming destiny; yet before death and the darkness of
death arrive, light has come; he perceives the wanderings of the way,
and in one supreme hour or in one shining moment he gives indefeasible
pledges of the loyalty which he has forfeited. Shelley in _Alastor_, the
influence of which on Browning in writing _Pauline_ is evident, had
rebuked the idealist within himself, who would live in lofty
abstractions to the loss of human sympathy and human love. Browning in
_Pauline_ also recognises this danger, but he indicates others--the risk
of the lower faculties of the mind encroaching upon and even displacing
the higher, the risk of the spirit of aggrandisement, even in the world
of the imagination, obtaining the mastery over the spirit of surrender
to that which is higher than self. It is quite right and needful to
speak of the "lesson" of Browning's poem, and the lesson of _Pauline_ is
designed to inculcate first loyalty to a man's highest power, and
secondly a worshipping loyalty and service to that which transcends
himself, named by the speaker in _Pauline_ by the old and simple name of
God.

Was it the problem of his own life--that concerning the conduct of high,
intellectual and spiritual powers--which Browning transferred to his
art, creating personages other than himself to be exponents of his
theme? We cannot tell; but the problem in varied forms persists from
poem to poem. The poet imagined as twenty years of age, who makes his
fragment of a confession in _Pauline_, is more than a poet; he is rather
of the Sordello type than of the type represented in Eglamor and
Aprile.[13] Through his imagination he would comprehend and possess all
forms of life, of beauty, of joy in nature and in humanity; but he must
also feel himself at the centre of these, the lord and master of his own