meantime he was laying, in an unsystematic but not ineffective way, the
foundations of his many-sided culture and accomplishment. We hear much
of private tutors, of instruction in French, in music, in riding,
fencing, boxing, dancing; of casual attendance also at the Greek classes
in University College. In all these matters he seems to have won more or
less definite accomplishment, and from most of them his versatile
literary talent took, at one time or another, an effective toll. The
athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop,
was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before,
the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of
hoofs.

Of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in short that was going
on under the surface of this brilliant and versatile Robert Browning of
twenty, we have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment _Pauline_.
The quite peculiar animosity with which its author in later life
regarded this single "crab" of his youthful tree of knowledge only adds
to its interest. He probably resented the frank expression of passion,
nowhere else approached in his works. Yet passion only agitates the
surface of _Pauline_. Whether Pauline herself stand for an actual
woman--Miss Flower or another--or for the nascent spell of
womanhood--she plays, for one who is ostensibly the heroine of the poem,
a discouragingly minor part. No wonder she felt tempted to advise the
burning of so unflattering a record. Instead of the lyric language of
love, she has to receive the confessions of a subtle psychologist, who
must unlock the tumultuous story of his soul "before he can sing." And
these confessions are of a kind rare even amongst self-revelations of
genius. Pauline's lover is a dreamer, but a dreamer of an uncommon
species. He is preoccupied with the processes of his mind, but his mind
ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is