They were probably first found praiseworthy, not only because they
were simpler, but because, being more like work already understood
and approved, adventurous criticism was needed to taste their
quality. The other longer poems in blank verse, graver and more
dignified, yet even more vivid, and far more life-encompassing,
which bore the rounded impress of the living human being, instead of
the shadowy motion of the lively human fancy--these are the birth of
a process of imaginative brooding upon the development of man by
means of individuality throughout the slow, unceasing flow of human
history. Browning evidently grew aware that whatever these poems of
personality might prove to be worth to the world, these were the
ones deserving of a place apart, under the early title of "Men and
Women," which he thought especially suited to the more roundly
modelled and distinctively colored exemplars of his peculiar
faculty.

In his next following collection, under the similar descriptive
title of "Dramatis Personae," he added to this class of work,
shaping in the mould of blank verse mainly used for "Men and Women"
his personifications of the Medium Mr. Sludge, the embryo theologian
Caliban, the ripened mystical saint of "A Death in the Desert";
while Abt Vogler, the creative musician, Rabbi ben Ezra, the
intuitional philosopher, and the chastened adept in loving, James
Lee's wife, although held within the embrace of their maker's
dramatic conception of them, as persons of his stage, were made to
pour out their speech in rhyme as Johannes Agricola in the earlier
volume uttered his creed and Rudel his love-message, as if the heat
of their emotion-moved personality required such an outlet. Some
such general notion as this of the scope of this volume, and of the
design of the poet in the construction, classification, and orderly