show of thought, that is the scope of his work. It makes him pre-
eminently a modern poet--a poet of the self-pondering, perfectly
educated, modern world, which, having come to the end of all direct
and purely external experiences, must necessarily turn for its
entertainment to the world within:--

"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his
creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars,
saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians,
priests and Popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls,
princesses, dancers with the wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of
Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls
and malevolent grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of
humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists,
heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality
and men of low estate--men and women as multiform as nature or
society has made them."

The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from,
yet revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr.
Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
the universe, a centre of creation." It is always the particular
soul, and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the
particular soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the
test--in which he interests us. With him it is always "a drama of
the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how
each soul becomes conscious of itself." In the Preface to the later
edition of Sordello, Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little
else seems worth study except the development of a soul, the
incidents, the story, of that. And, [45] in fact, the intellectual