In the quotations I have made, and in others that might be selected
(e.g., "Her fresh eyes, and soft hair, and `lips which bleed like
a mountain berry'"), it is easy to note how intimate an observer of nature
the youthful poet was, and with what conscious but not obtrusive art
he brings forward his new and striking imagery. Browning, indeed,
is the poet of new symbols.

"Pauline" concludes with lines which must have been in the minds of many
on that sad day when the tidings from Venice sent a thrill of startled,
half-incredulous, bewildered pain throughout the English nations --

"Sun-treader, I believe in God, and truth,
And love; . . .
. . . but chiefly when I die . . .
All in whom this wakes pleasant thoughts of me,
Know my last state is happy -- free from doubt,
Or touch of fear."

Never again was Browning to write a poem with such conceptive crudeness,
never again to tread the byways of thought so falteringly or so negligently:
but never again, perhaps, was he to show so much over-rapturing joy
in the world's loveliness, such Bacchic abandon to the ideal beauty
which the true poet sees glowing upon the forlornest height and brooding
in the shadow-haunted hollows of the hills. The Browning who might have been
is here: henceforth the Browning we know and love stands unique
among all the lords of song. But sometimes do we not turn longingly,
wonderingly at least, to the young Dionysos upon whose forehead
was the light of another destiny than that which descended upon him?
The Icelanders say there is a land where all the rainbows that have ever been,
or are yet to be, forever drift to and fro, evanishing and reappearing,