Read it through once

The idea of personality as a quickening, regenerating power, and the idea of art as an intermediate agency of personality, are, perhaps, the most reiterated (implicitly, not explicitly) in Browning’s poetry, and lead up to the dominant idea of Christianity, the idea of a Divine Personality; the idea that the soul, to use an expression from his earliest poem, ‘Pauline’, must “rest beneath some better essence than itself in weakness”.