If so, he had escaped from this youthful error before he had finished the poem, and despised it, perhaps too much.

It is excusable and natural in the young.

His contempt for this kind of love is embodied in the second Pauline.

She is not the woman her lover imagines her to be, but far older and more experienced than her lover; who has known long ago what love was; who always liked to be loved, who therefore suffers her lover to expatiate as wildly as he pleases; but whose life is quite apart from him, enduring him with pleasurable patience, criticising him, wondering how he can be so excited.

There is a dim perception in the lover's phrases of these elements in his mistress' character; and that they are in her character is quite plain from the patronising piece of criticism in French which Browning has put into her mouth.