And so the story remains half a shadow.

The poem is dramatic, yet, like so much of Browning's work, it is not pure drama coming from profound sympathy with a spirit other than the writer's own; it is only hybrid drama, in which the _dramatis persona_ thinks and moves and acts under the necessity of expounding certain ideas of the poet.

Browning's puppets are indeed too often in his earlier poems moved by intellectual wires; the hands are the hands of Luria or Djabal, but the voice is the showman's voice.

A certain intemperance in the pursuit of poetic beauty, strange and lovely imagery which obscures rather than interprets, may be regarded as in _Pauline_ the fault or the glory of youth; a young heir arrived at his inheritance will scatter gold pieces.

The verse has caught something of its affluent flow, its wavelike career, wave advancing upon wave, from Shelley: 'Tis he, I ken the manner of his gait; He rises on the toe; that spirit of his In aspiration lifts him from the earth.
The aspiration in Browning's later verse is a complex of many forces; here it is a simple poetic enthusiasm.
By virtue of its central theme _Pauline_ is closely related to the poems which at no great distance followed--_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_.