And take for a nobler stage the soul itself,
In shifting fancies and celestial lights,
With all its grand orchestral silences,
To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds."[2]

This new form of drama is the drama as we see it in Browning, a drama
of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul. Instead of a grouping
of characters which shall act on one another to produce a certain result
in action, we have a grouping of events useful or important only as they
influence the character or the mind. This is very clearly explained in
the original Advertisement to _Paracelsus_, where Browning tells us that
his poem is an attempt

"to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim
it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the
passions, by the operation of persons and events; and that,
instead of having recourse to an external machinery of
incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to
produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the
mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the
agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be
generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate
throughout, if not altogether excluded."

In this way, by making the soul the centre of action, he is enabled
(thinking himself into it, as all dramatists must do) to bring out its
characteristics, to reveal its very nature. Suppose him to be attracted
by some particular soul or by some particular act. The problem occupies
him: the more abstruse and entangled the more attractive to him it is;
he winds his way into the heart of it, or, we might better say, he picks