from 'Mildred Tresham'? What action of what play is more happily
conceived or better rendered than that of 'Pippa Passes'?--where
innocence and its reverse, tender love and violent passion, are
presented with emphasis, and yet blended into a dramatic unity and a
poetic perfection, entitling the author to the very first place
amongst those dramatists of the century who have laboured under the
enormous disadvantage of being poets to start with.

Passing from the plays, we are next attracted by a number of splendid
poems, on whose base the structure of Mr. Browning's fame perhaps
rests most surely--his dramatic pieces--poems which give utterance to
the thoughts and feelings of persons other than himself, or, as he
puts it, when dedicating a number of them to his wife:

'Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead, or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from every mouth the speech--a poem;'

or, again, in 'Sordello':

'By making speak, myself kept out of view,
The very man, as he was wont to do.'

At a rough calculation, there must be at least sixty of these pieces.
Let me run over the names of a very few of them. 'Saul,' a poem
beloved by all true women; 'Caliban,' which the men, not unnaturally
perhaps, often prefer. The 'Two Bishops'; the sixteenth century one
ordering his tomb of jasper and basalt in St. Praxed's Church, and his
nineteenth century successor rolling out his post-prandial