_Paracelsus, Sordello_ and the soul-dissecting poems in _Bells and
Pomegranates_ fell on an unheeding world. But Browning did not heed the
unheeding of the world. He had the courage of his aims in art, and while
he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to
its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of
the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern of
the inner life of men. And then, when the tendency of which I speak had
collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous
amazement, found him out. "Here is a man," it said, "who has been doing
in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so
fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety. We will
read him now." So Browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of
the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having
reached him, he became a favoured poet.

However, fond as he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into
the extremes into which other writers carried it, _Paracelsus_ is,
indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but
_Sordello_ combines with a similar history a tale of political and
warlike action in which men and women, like Salinguerra and Palma, who
live in outward work rather than in inward thought, are described; while
in poems like _Pippa Passes_ and some of the Dramas, emotion and
thought, intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were, into a
lightning of swift deeds. Nor are other poems wanting, in which, not
long analysis, but short passion, fiery outbursts of thought, taking
immediate form, are represented with astonishing intensity.

2. This second remarkable power of his touches the transition which has
begun to carry us, in the last few years, from the subjective to the
objective in art. The time came, and quite lately, when art, weary of