we have the real Browning in

"So I will sing on--fast as fancies come
Rudely--the verse being as the mood it paints.
* * * * *
I am made up of an intensest life,"

and all the succeeding lines down to "Their spirit dwelt in me, and I
should rule."

Even then the poet's inner life was animated by his love of the
beautiful Greek literature. Telling how in "the first dawn of life,"
"which passed alone with wisest ancient books," Pauline's lover
incorporated himself in whatsoever he read--was the god wandering after
beauty, the giant standing vast against the sunset-light, the
high-crested chief sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos--his
second-self cries, "I tell you, nought has ever been so clear as the
place, the time, the fashion of those lives." Never for him, then, had
there been that alchemy of the soul which turns the inchoate drift of
the world into golden ore, not then had come to him the electric
awakening flash from "work of lofty art, nor woman's beauty, nor sweet
nature's face"--

"Yet, I say, never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea:
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves--
And nothing ever will surprise me now--
Who stood beside the naked Swift-footed,
Who bound my forehead with Proserpine's hair."