tinged with its feeling and its thought. Half the value of a story for
him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator's personality; and
he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most
easily and effectively through alien lips. For a like reason he loved to
survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a
given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it
imposed. Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which
directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue,
which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's
dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the
wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments
tense with memory and hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise
of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. He
sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the
area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive
with moving shapes. To the stricken girl in _Ye Banks and Braes_ memory
is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points,
the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love;
whereas the victim of _The Confessional_ pours forth from her frenzied
lips every detail of her tragic story.

So in _The Laboratory_, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama
are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of
fierce impassioned consciousness:--

"He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."