Further, the allusion to Plato, and the more remote one to Agamemnon, the

"old lore
Loved for itself, and all it shows--the King
Treading the purple calmly to his death,"

and the beautiful Andromeda passage, afford ample indication of how
deeply Browning had drunk of that vital stream whose waters are the
surest conserver of the ideal loveliness which we all of us, in some
degree, cherish in various guises.

Yet, as in every long poem that he has written (and, it must be
admitted, in too many of the shorter pieces of his later period) there
is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry, so in "Pauline,"
written though it was in the first flush of his genius and under the
inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters prosaic passages,
decasyllabically arranged. "Twas in my plan to look on real life, which
was all new to me; my theories were firm, so I left them, to look upon
men, and their cares, and hopes, and fears, and joys; and, as I
pondered on them all, I sought how best life's end might be attained, an
end comprising every joy." Again: "Then came a pause, and long restraint
chained down my soul, till it was changed. I lost myself, and were it
not that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned to
turn my mind against itself ... at length I was restored, yet long the
influence remained; and nought but the still life I led, apart from all,
which left my soul to seek its old delights, could e'er have brought me
thus far back to peace." No reader, alert to the subtle and haunting
music of rarefied blank verse (and unless it be rarefied it should not
be put forward as poetry), could possibly accept these lines as