He planned, Mr Gosse tells us, "a series of monodramatic epics, narratives of the life of typical souls." In a modification of this vast scheme _Paracelsus_, which includes more speakers than one, and _Sordello_, which is not dramatic in form, find their places.

They were preceded by _Pauline_, in the strictest sense a monodrama, a poem not less large in conception than either of the others, though this "fragment of a confession" is wrought out on a more contracted scale.
_Pauline_, published without the writer's name--his aunt Silverthorne bearing the cost of publication--was issued from the press in January 1833.[12] Browning had not yet completed his twenty-first year.

When including it among his poetical works in 1867, he declared that he did so with extreme repugnance and solely with a view to anticipate unauthorised republication of what was no more than a "crude preliminary sketch," entirely lacking in good draughtsmanship and right handling.
For the edition of twenty years later, 1888, he revised and corrected _Pauline_ without re-handling it to any considerable extent.

In truth _Pauline_ is a poem from which Browning ought not to have desired to detach his mature self.

Rarely does a poem by a writer so young deserve better to be read for its own sake.