INTRODUCTORY GROUP.

"PAULINE," "PARACELSUS," "SORDELLO."


These three poems are Mr. Browning's first, and they are also, as I have
said, the one partial exception to the unity and continuousness of his
work; they have, at least, one common characteristic which detaches them
from the remainder of it. Each is in its different way the study of a
human spirit, too ambitious to submit to the limits of human existence,
and which learns humility in its unsuccessful conflict with them. This
ambition is of its nature poetic, and seems so much in harmony with Mr.
Browning's mind--young and untutored by experience as it then was, full
of the consciousness of its own powers as it must have been--that it is
difficult not to recognize in it a phase of his own intellectual life.
But if it was so, it is one which he had already outgrown, or lived much
more in fancy than in fact. His sympathy with the ambition of Paracelsus
and Sordello is steadily counteracted by his judgment of it; and we are
only justified in asserting what is beyond dispute: that these poems
represent an introductory phase of the author's imagination, one which
begins and ends in them. The mind of his men and women will be exercised
on many things, but never again so much upon itself. The vivid sense of
their personality will be less in their minds than in his own.


"PAULINE." (1832.)

This poem is, as its title declares, a fragment of a confession. The
speaker is a man, probably still young; and Pauline, the name of the