Another contrast appears at the very beginning of their career.
Tennyson, in his two earliest books in 1830 and 1833, though clearly original in some poems, had clinging round his singing robes some of the rags of the past.

He wrote partly in the weak and sentimental strain of the poets between 1822 and 1832.

Browning, on the contrary, sprang at once into an original poetic life of his own.

_Pauline_ was unfinished, irregular in form, harsh, abrupt, and overloaded, but it was also entirely fresh and distinct.

The influence of Shelley echoes in it, but much more in admiration than in imitation of him.