that he became ardently in love with a girl of rare beauty,
a year or two older than himself, but otherwise, possibly,
no inappropriate lover for this wooer. Why and when this early passion
came to a close, or was rudely interrupted, is not known.
What is certain is that it made a deep impression on the poet's mind.
It may be that it, of itself, or wrought to a higher emotion
by his hunger after ideal beauty, was the source of "Pauline",
that very unequal but yet beautiful first fruit of Browning's genius.

It was not till within the last few years that the poet spoke at all freely
of his youthful life. Perhaps the earliest record of these utterances
is that which appeared in the `Century Magazine' in 1881.
From this source, and from what the poet himself said at various times
and in various ways, we know that just about the time Balzac,
after years of apparently waste labour, was beginning to forecast
the Titanic range of the `Comedie Humaine', Browning planned
"a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls --
a gigantic scheme at which a Victor Hugo or a Lope de Vega
would start back aghast."

Already he had set himself to the analysis of the human soul
in its manifold aspects, already he had recognised that for him at least
there was no other study worthy of a lifelong devotion.
In a sense he has fulfilled this early dream: at any rate
we have a unique series of monodramatic poems, illustrative of typical souls.
In another sense, the major portion of Browning's life-work is, collectively,
one monodramatic "epic". He is himself a type of the subtle, restless,
curious, searching modern age of which he is the profoundest interpreter.
Through a multitude of masks he, the typical soul, speaks,
and delivers himself of a message which could not be presented