a line which tells us how Browning wished his metrical movement to be judged. This is the exordium, and it is already full of his theory of life—the soul forced from within to aspire to the perfect whole, the necessary failure, the despair, the new impulse to love arising out of the despair; failure making fresh growth, fresh uncontentment. God has sent a new impulse from without; let me begin again.
Then, in the new light, he strips his mind bare. What am I? What have I done? Where am I going?
The first element in his soul, he thinks, is a living personality, linked to a principle of restlessness,
Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all.
And this would plunge him into the depths of self were it not for that Imagination in him whose power never fails to bear him beyond himself; and is finally in him a need, a trust, a yearning after God; whom, even when he is most lost, he feels is always acting on him, and at every point of life transcending him.
And Imagination began to create, and made him at one with all men and women of whom he had read (the same motive is repeated in Sordello), but especially at one with those out of the Greek world he loved—"a God wandering after Beauty"—a high-crested chief
Sailing with troops of friends to Tenedos.
Never was anything more clear than these lives he lived beyond himself; and the lines in which he records the vision have all the sharpness and beauty of his after-work—
I had not seen a work of lofty art.
Nor woman's beauty nor sweet Nature's face,