Treading the purple calmly to his death,"

and the beautiful Andromeda passage, afford ample indication
of how deeply Browning had drunk of that vital stream
whose waters are the surest conserver of the ideal loveliness
which we all of us, in some degree, cherish in various guises.

Yet, as in every long poem that he has written (and, it must be admitted,
in too many of the shorter pieces of his later period)
there is an alloy of prose, of something that is not poetry,
so in "Pauline", written though it was in the first flush of his genius
and under the inspiring stimulus of Shelley, the reader encounters
prosaic passages, decasyllabically arranged. "'Twas in my plan
to look on real life, which was all new to me; my theories were firm,
so I left them, to look upon men, and their cares, and hopes,
and fears, and joys; and, as I pondered on them all,
I sought how best life's end might be attained, an end comprising every joy."
Again: "Then came a pause, and long restraint chained down my soul,
till it was changed. I lost myself, and were it not
that I so loathe that time, I could recall how first I learned
to turn my mind against itself . . . at length I was restored,
yet long the influence remained; and nought but the still life I led,
apart from all, which left my soul to seek its old delights,
could e'er have brought me thus far back to peace." No reader,
alert to the subtle and haunting music of rarefied blank verse
(and unless it be rarefied it should not be put forward as poetry),
could possibly accept these lines as expressionally poetical.
It would seem as though, from the first, Browning's ear was keener
for the apprehension than for the sustained evocation of the music of verse.
Some flaw there was, somewhere. His heart, so to say, beat too fast,