forced to recognise. Mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of
introspection, recognised with amazement the "intense self-consciousness"
of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists
through all its changing harmonies. It is the self-consciousness of a
soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to
recognise a host of outer realities not itself, which it constantly
strives to bring into relation with itself, as constantly baffled and
thrown back by the obstinate objectivity of that outer world. A pure
dreamer would have "contentedly lived in a nut-shell and imagined
himself king of infinite space"; a purely scientific intelligence would
have applied himself to the patient mastery of facts; in the hero of
_Pauline_ the despotic senses and intellect of science and the imperious
imagination of the poet appear to coexist and to contend, and he tosses
to and fro in a fever of fitful efforts, continually frustrated, to find
complete spiritual response and expressiveness in the intractable maze
of being. There had indeed been an earlier time when the visions of old
poets had wholly sufficed him; and the verses in which he recalls them
have almost the pellucid charm of Homer,--

"Never morn broke clear as those
On the dim clustered isles in the blue sea,
The deep groves, and white temples, and wet caves."

But growing intellect demanded something more. Shelley, the
"Sun-treader," weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture "from his
poet's station between both," did much to sustain him; Plato's more
explicit and systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger
assurance. But disillusion broke in: "Suddenly, without heart-wreck I
awoke; I said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!"
Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh.