The witchcraft of the brain degrades the god in us: And then I was a young witch whose blue eyes, As she stood naked by the river springs, Drew down a god: I watched his radiant form Growing less radiant, and it gladdened me.
What he presents with such intensity of imaginative power Browning must have known--even if it were but for moments--by experience.

And again, there is impressive truth and originality in the description of the state of the poet's mind which succeeded the wreck of his early faith and early hopes inspired by the voice of Shelley--the revolutionary faith in liberty, equality and human perfectibility.

Wordsworth in _The Prelude_--unpublished when Browning wrote _Pauline_--which is also the history of a poet's mind, has described his own experience of the loss of all these shining hopes and lofty abstractions, and the temper of mind which he describes is one of moral chaos and spiritual despair.

The poet of _Pauline_ turns from political and social abstractions to real life, and the touch of reality awakens him as if from a splendid dream; but his mood is not so sane as that of despair.

He falls back, with a certain joy, upon the exercise of his inferior powers; he wakes suddenly and "without heart-wreck ": First went my hopes of perfecting mankind, Next--faith in them, and then in freedom's self And virtue's self, then my own motives, ends, And aims and loves, and human love went last.
I felt this no decay, because new powers Rose as old feelings left--wit, mockery, Light-heartedness; for I had oft been sad, Mistrusting my resolves, but now I cast Hope joyously away; I laughed and said "No more of this!" It is difficult to believe that Browning is wholly dramatic here; we seem to discover something of that period of _Sturm und Drang_, when his mood grew restless and aggressive.