But disillusion broke in: "Suddenly, without heart-wreck I awoke; I said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!" Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh.
He steeps himself in the concrete vitality of things, lives in imagination through "all life where it is most alive," immerses himself in all that is most beautiful and intense in Nature, so fulfilling, it might seem, his passionate craving to "be all, have, see, know, taste, feel all,"-- yet only to feel that satisfaction is not here: "My soul saddens when it looks beyond: I cannot be immortal, taste all joy;" only the sickness of satiety.

But when all joy was tasted, what then?
If there was any "crowning" state, it could only be, thought Browning, one in which the soul looked up to the unattainable infinity of God.
Such seem to be the outlines of the mental history which passes before us, brilliant and incoherent as a dream, in _Pauline_.

The material, vast and many-sided as it is, is not fully mastered; but there is nothing merely imitative; it is everywhere Browning, and no mere disciple of Shelley or another, who is palpably at work.

The influence of Shelley seems, indeed, to have been already outgrown when _Pauline_ was written; Browning gloried in him and in his increasing fame, but he felt that his own aims and destiny were different.

Rossetti, a few years later, took _Pauline_ to be the work of an unconscious pre-Raphaelite; and there is enough of subtle simplicity, of curious minuteness, in the details to justify the error.