under the stress of poetic emotion into the region of placid
contemplation, or to connect them into a system, by means of the
principle from which he makes his departure.

The first of these difficulties arises from the extent and variety of
his work. He was prodigal of poetic ideas, and wrote for fifty years on
nature, art, and man, like a magnificent spendthrift of spiritual
treasures. So great a store of knowledge lay at his hand, so real and
informed with sympathy, that we can scarcely find any great literature
which he has not ransacked, any phase of life which is not represented
in his poems. All kinds of men and women, in every station in life, and
at every stage of evil and goodness, crowd his pages. There are few
forms of human character he has not studied, and each individual he has
so caught at the supreme moment of his life, and in the hardest stress
of circumstance, that the inmost working of his nature is revealed. The
wealth is bewildering, and it is hard to follow the central thought,
"the imperial chord, which steadily underlies the accidental mists of
music springing thence."[A]

[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_.]

A second and still graver difficulty lies in the fact that his poetry,
as he repeatedly insisted, is "always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine."[B] In his earlier
works, especially, Browning is creative rather than reflective, a Maker
rather than a Seer; and his creations stand aloof from him, working out
their fate in an outer world. We often lose the poet in the imaginative
characters, into whom he penetrates with his keen artistic intuition,
and within whom he lies as a necessity revealing itself in their actions
and words. It is not easy anywhere to separate the elements, so that we