Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and Robert Browning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultless couplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that the world contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something that he cannot understand.
The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, to this ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution.

_Pauline_ appeared anonymously in 1833.

It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenile poem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old.
Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr.Johnson Fox, an old friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait's Magazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to find anything more purely confessional.

It is the typical confession of a boy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moral waste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one else has committed them.

It is wholesome and natural for youth to go about confessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priest hoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven.