wavering lights of his hectic malady and fluctuating moods of
passion--are dealt with in a singularly interesting and original way. He
describes, with strange and beautiful imagery, the cynical, bitter
pleasure--few of us do not know it--which the intellectual faculties
sometimes derive from mocking and drawing down to their own level the
spiritual powers, the intuitive powers, which are higher than they,
higher, yet less capable of justification or verification by the common
tests of sense and understanding. The witchcraft of the brain degrades
the god in us:

And then I was a young witch whose blue eyes,
As she stood naked by the river springs,
Drew down a god: I watched his radiant form
Growing less radiant, and it gladdened me.

What he presents with such intensity of imaginative power Browning must
have known--even if it were but for moments--by experience. And again,
there is impressive truth and originality in the description of the
state of the poet's mind which succeeded the wreck of his early faith
and early hopes inspired by the voice of Shelley--the revolutionary
faith in liberty, equality and human perfectibility. Wordsworth in _The
Prelude_--unpublished when Browning wrote _Pauline_--which is also the
history of a poet's mind, has described his own experience of the loss
of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of
mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair. The
poet of _Pauline_ turns from political and social abstractions to real
life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream;
but his mood is not so sane as that of despair. He falls back, with a
certain joy, upon the exercise of his inferior powers; he wakes suddenly
and "without heart-wreck ":