May gather strength to pledge and drink
Your wine of wonderment,
While you pardon me all blessingly
The woe mine Adam sent.

In the end Mrs. Browning makes her poet realize that he is crushing the
best part of his nature by thus thwarting his human instincts.

No, the poet's virtue must not be a pruning of his human nature, but a
flowering of it. Nowhere are the Brownings more in sympathy than in
their recognition of this fact. In _Pauline_, Browning traces the poet's
mistaken effort to find goodness in self-restraint and denial. It is a
failure, and the poem ends with the hero's recognition that "life is
truth, and truth is good." The same idea is one of the leading motives
in _Sordello_.

One seems to be coming perilously near the decadent poet's argument
again. And there remains to be dealt with a poet more extreme than
Browning--Walt Whitman, who challenges us with his slogan, "Clear and
sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul,"
[Footnote: _Song of Myself_.] and then records his zest in throwing
himself into all phases of life.

It is plain, at any rate, how the abandon of the decadent might develop
from the poet's insistence upon his need to follow impulse utterly, to
develop himself in all directions. The cry of Browning's poet in
_Pauline_,

I had resolved
No age should come on me ere youth was spent,