This brave and joyous note is the essential Browning, and to me it supplies an easy explanation for his much-discussed rejection of the very early poem _Pauline_, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he never in later life cared at all--more, he wished to suppress it. In _Pauline_, his deepest sense of woman's spiritual function is falsified. This might be accounted for by the fact that it was written at twenty-one, if it were not that at twenty-one most young men are most "original." Browning, in this as in other things, broke down tradition, for _Pauline_ is by far the least original of his works in outlook--it is, indeed, in outlook, of the purest common-place. "It exhibits," says Mr. Chesterton, "the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old"; and it exhibits too the entirely un-characteristic mark of a Browning poem, the general suggestion that the poet has not thought for himself on a subject which he was, in the issue, almost to make his own--that of the inspiring, as opposed (for in Browning the antithesis is as marked as that) to the consoling, power of a beloved woman. From the very first line this emotional flaccidity is evident-- "Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me--thy soft breast Shall pant to mine--bend o'er me--thy sweet eyes And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms Drawing me to thee--these build up a screen To shut me in with thee, and from all fear . . ." And again in the picture of her, lovely to the sense, but, in some strange fashion, hardly less than nauseating to the mind-- ". . . Love looks through-- Whispers--E'en at the last I have her still, With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist . . . How the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread As thinned by kisses! only in her lips It wells and pulses like a living thing, And her neck looks like marble misted o'er With love-breath--a Pauline from heights above, Stooping beneath me, looking up--one look As I might kill her and be loved the more. So love me--me, Pauline, and nought but me, Never leave loving! . . ."