We hear much of private tutors, of instruction in French, in music, in riding, fencing, boxing, dancing; of casual attendance also at the Greek classes in University College.

In all these matters he seems to have won more or less definite accomplishment, and from most of them his versatile literary talent took, at one time or another, an effective toll.

The athletic musician, who composed his own songs and gloried in a gallop, was to make verse simulate, as hardly any artificer had made it before, the labyrinthine meanderings of the fugue and the rhythmic swing of hoofs.
Of all these varied aims and aspirations, of all in short that was going on under the surface of this brilliant and versatile Robert Browning of twenty, we have a chaotic reflection in the famous fragment _Pauline_.
The quite peculiar animosity with which its author in later life regarded this single "crab" of his youthful tree of knowledge only adds to its interest.

He probably resented the frank expression of passion, nowhere else approached in his works.

Yet passion only agitates the surface of _Pauline_.