precluded in it all possible, even unconscious, bias of personal
interest or sympathy. But this belongs to a somewhat later period of our
history.

I am dwelling at some length on this first experience of Mr. Browning's
literary career, because the confidence which it gave him determined its
immediate future, if not its ultimate course--because, also, the poem
itself is more important to the understanding of his mind than perhaps
any other of his isolated works. It was the earliest of his dramatic
creations; it was therefore inevitably the most instinct with himself;
and we may regard the 'Confession' as to a great extent his own, without
for an instant ignoring the imaginative element which necessarily and
certainly entered into it. At one moment, indeed, his utterance is so
emphatic that we should feel it to be direct, even if we did not know it
to be true. The passage beginning, 'I am made up of an intensest life,'
conveys something more than the writer's actual psychological state. The
feverish desire of life became gradually modified into a more or less
active intellectual and imaginative curiosity; but the sense of
an individual, self-centred, and, as it presented itself to him,
unconditioned existence, survived all the teachings of experience, and
often indeed unconsciously imposed itself upon them.

I have already alluded to that other and more pathetic fragment of
distinct autobiography which is to be found in the invocation to the
'Sun-treader'. Mr. Fox, who has quoted great part of it, justly declares
that 'the fervency, the remembrance, the half-regret mingling with
its exultation, are as true as its leading image is beautiful.' The
'exultation' is in the triumph of Shelley's rising fame; the regret, for
the lost privilege of worshipping in solitary tenderness at an obscure
shrine. The double mood would have been characteristic of any period of