emphatically enough as the utterance of a single individual.
He is a true dramatic poet, though not in the sense in which Shakespeare is.
Shakespeare and his kindred project themselves into the lives
of their imaginary personages: Browning pays little heed to external life,
or to the exigencies of action, and projects himself
into the minds of his characters.

In a word, Shakespeare's method is to depict a human soul in action,
with all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning's is to portray
the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said
in his dedicatory preface to "Sordello", "little else is worth study."
The one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities;
the other flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex,
shaping potentialities. The one deals with life dynamically,
the other with life as Thought. Both methods are compassed by art.
Browning, who is above all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations,
is surpassed by many of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence.
His finest work is in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas.
He realised intensely the value of quintessential moments,
as when the Prefect in "The Return of the Druses" thrusts aside the arras,
muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom,
"no draught coming as from a sepulchre" saluting him,
while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart:
or, further in the same poem, when Anael, coming to denounce Djabal
as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead
with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till
she has proclaimed him the God by her single worshipping cry, `Hakeem!' --
or, once more, in "The Ring and the Book", where, with the superbest close
of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched Guido,
at the point of death, cries out in the last extremity