It is rather singular, in view of the great vogue of the sonnet in
the nineteenth century, that neither Tennyson nor Browning should
have succeeded in this form. The two men wrote very few
sonnets--Browning fewer than Tennyson--and neither ever wrote a
great one. Longfellow, so inferior in most respects to his two great
English contemporaries, was an incomparably superior sonnetteer.
Tennyson's sonnets are all mediocre: Browning did not publish a
single sonnet in the final complete edition of his works. He did
however print a very few on special occasions, and when he was
twenty-two years old, between the composition of _Pauline_ and
_Paracelsus_, there appeared in the _Monthly Repository_ a sonnet
beginning

Eyes calm beside thee (Lady, could'st thou know!)

which is the best example from his pen that has been preserved.
Although he did not think much of it in later years, it has been
frequently reprinted, and is worth keeping; both for the ardor of
its passion, and because it is extraordinary that he should have
begun so very early in his career a form of verse that he
practically abandoned. This sonnet may have been addressed to a
purely imaginary ideal; but it is possible that the young man had in
mind Eliza Flower, for whom he certainly had a boyish love, and who
was probably the original of Pauline. She and her sister, Sarah
Flower, the author of _Nearer, My God, to Thee_, were both older
than Browning, and both his intimate friends during the period of
his adolescence.