perceptions and creations; and yet, at the same time, this man is made
for the worship and service of a power higher than self. How is such a
nature as this to attain its true ends? What are its special dangers? 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