But the records of that particular period of development, even when they are as ornate and beautiful as _Pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesome reading.

The chief interest of _Pauline_, with all its beauties, lies in a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, of all people, should have signalised his entrance into the world of letters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid.

But this is a morbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in a contradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectual measles.

No one of any degree of maturity in reading _Pauline_ will be quite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells the story as he seems to be himself.

It is the utterance of that bitter and heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the one grand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin.
The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regards all his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only later that he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignant explanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.