And the lines in _Pauline_ which I now quote, spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old: As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew, The morning swallows with their songs like words.
All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts: So, aught connected with my early life, My rude songs or my wild imaginings, How I look on them--most distinct amid The fever and the stir of after years! The next description in _Pauline_ is that in which he describes--to illustrate what Shelley was to him--the woodland spring which became a mighty river.

Shelley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to him like a sacred spring: Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross, And one small tree embowers droopingly-- Joying to see some wandering insect won To live in its few rushes, or some locust To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air.
A piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough; needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in his work of his deliberate use of Nature, not for love of herself only, (Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron would have described the spring in the woods for its own sake), but for illustration of humanity.

It is Shelley--Shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, Shelley hidden in the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling upwards into personal poetry--of whom Browning is now thinking.

The image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain and left the insects and birds alone.

It is Shelley also of whom he thinks--Shelley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of mankind--when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and follows it to the sea: And then should find it but the fountain head, Long lost, of some great river washing towns And towers, and seeing old woods which will live But by its banks untrod of human foot.
Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering In light as some thing lieth half of life Before God's foot, waiting a wondrous change; Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay Its course in vain, for it does ever spread Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on, Being the pulse of some great country--so Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world! How good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! How much it needs thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! And the faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the needless, are faults of which Browning never quite cleared his work.