He steeps himself in the concrete vitality of things, lives in
imagination through "all life where it is most alive," immerses himself
in all that is most beautiful and intense in Nature, so fulfilling, it
might seem, his passionate craving to "be all, have, see, know, taste,
feel all,"--yet only to feel that satisfaction is not here:

"My soul saddens when it looks beyond:
I cannot be immortal, taste all joy;"

only the sickness of satiety. But when all joy was tasted, what then? If
there was any "crowning" state, it could only be, thought Browning, one
in which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity of God.

Such seem to be the outlines of the mental history which passes before
us, brilliant and incoherent as a dream, in _Pauline_. The material,
vast and many-sided as it is, is not fully mastered; but there is
nothing merely imitative; it is everywhere Browning, and no mere
disciple of Shelley or another, who is palpably at work. The influence
of Shelley seems, indeed, to have been already outgrown when _Pauline_
was written; Browning gloried in him and in his increasing fame, but he
felt that his own aims and destiny were different. Rossetti, a few years
later, took _Pauline_ to be the work of an unconscious pre-Raphaelite;
and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the
details to justify the error. In the meantime many outward circumstances
conspired to promote the "advance" which every line of it foretold. His
old mentor of the _Incondita_ days, W.J. Fox, in some sort a Browningite
before Browning, reviewed _Pauline_ in _The Monthly Repository_ (April
1833) with generous but discerning praise. This was the beginning of a
warm friendship between the two, which ended only with Fox's death. It
was founded upon hearty admiration on both sides, and no man living was