* * * * *

We might infer from this, as from his subsequent introduction, that Mr.
Browning disclaimed all that is extravagant in the poem, and laid it
simply to the charge of the imaginary person it is intended to depict:
but that he has also prefaced it with a curious Latin quotation which
identifies that person with himself.[8]

"Pauline" did not take its place among the author's collected works till
1868, when the uniform edition of them appeared; and he then introduced
it by a preface (to which I have just alluded) in which he declared his
unwillingness to publish such a boyish production, and gave the reasons
which induced him to do so. The poem is boyish, or at all events
youthful, in point of conception; and we need not wonder that this
intellectual crudeness should have outweighed its finished poetic
beauties in its author's mind. It contains however one piece of mental
portraiture which, with slight modifications, might have stood for Mr.
Browning when he re-edited the work, as it clearly did when he wrote it.
It begins thus (vol. i. page 14):

"I am made up of an intensest life,"

The tribute at page 14[9] to the saving power of imagination is also
characteristic of his maturer mind, though expressed in an ambiguous
manner. It is interesting to know that in the line (page 26),

"the king
Treading the purple calmly to his death,"

he was thinking of Agamemnon: as this shows how early his love of