attractive to some minds, which we speak of as coming only from the
poet's brain. He imagines vividly because he observes keenly and also
feels strongly; and this vividness of his nature puts him in equal
sympathy with the real and the ideal--with the seen and the unseen. The
one is as living to him as the other.

His treatment of visible and of invisible realities constitutes him
respectively a dramatic and a metaphysical poet; but, as the two kinds
of reality are inseparable in human life, so are the corresponding
qualities inseparable in Mr. Browning's work. The dramatic activity of
his genius always includes the metaphysical. His genius always shows
itself as dramatic and metaphysical at the same time.

Mr. Browning's genius is dramatic because it always expresses itself in
the forms of real life, in the supposed experiences of men and women.
These men and women are usually in a state of mental disturbance or
conflict; indeed, they think much more than they act. But their thinking
tends habitually to a practical result; and it keeps up our sense of
their reality by clothing itself always in the most practical and
picturesque language which thought can assume. It has been urged that he
does not sink himself in his characters as a completely dramatic writer
should; and this argument must stand for what it is worth. His
personality may in some degree be constructed from his works: it is, I
think, generally admitted, that that of Shakespeare cannot; and in so
far as this is the test of a complete dramatist, Mr. Browning fails of
being one. He does not sink himself in his men and women, for his
sympathy with them is too active to admit of it. He not only describes
their different modes of being, but defends them from their own point of
view; and it is natural that he should often select for this treatment
characters with which he is already disposed to sympathize. But his