My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, Saul, Abt Vogler, and The Last Ride Together are a few of his strong representative monologues.  The speaker in My Last Duchess is the widowed duke, who is describing the portrait of his lost wife.  In his blind conceit, he is utterly unconscious that he is exhibiting clearly his own coldly selfish nature and his wife’s sweet, sunny disposition.  The chief power of the poem lies in the astonishing ease with which he is made to reveal his own character.

The interest in Andrea del Sarto is in the mental conflict of this “faultless painter.”  He wishes, on the one hand, to please his wife with popular pictures, and yet he yearns for higher ideals of his art.  He says:—­

  “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
  Or what’s a heaven for?”

As he sits in the twilight, holding his wife’s hand, and talking in a half-musing way, it is readily seen that his love for this beautiful but soulless woman has caused many of his failures and sorrows in the past, and will continue to arouse conflicts of soul in the future.

Abt Vogler, one of Browning’s noblest and most melodious poems, voices the exquisite raptures of a musician’s soul:—­

  “But God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
  The rest may reason and welcome:  ’tis we musicians know.”

The beautiful song of David in the poem entitled Saul shows a wonderful sympathy with the old Hebrew prophecies. Cleon expresses the views of an early Greek upon the teachings of Christ and St. Paul. The Soliloquy of a Spanish Cloister describes the development of a coarse, jealous nature in monastic life. The Last Ride Together is one of Browning’s many passionate poems on the ennobling power of love.  That remarkable, grotesque poem, Caliban upon Setebos, transcends human fields altogether, and displays the brutelike theology of a fiend.

In these monologues, Browning interprets characters of varying faiths, nationalities, stations, and historic periods.  He shows a wide range of knowledge and sympathy.  One type, however, which he rarely presents, is the simple, commonplace man or woman.  Browning excels in the portrayal of unusual, intricate, and difficult characters that have complicated problems to face, weaknesses to overcome, or lofty ambitions to attain.

The Ring and the Book.—­When Browning was asked what he would advise a student of his poetry to read first, he replied:  “The Ring and the Book, of course.”  He worked on this masterly study of human souls for many years in the decade in which his wife died.  This poem (1868), which has been facetiously called “a Roman murder story,” was suggested to him by a “square old yellow book,” which he purchased for a few cents at Florence in 1860.  This manuscript, dated 1698, gives an account of the trial of Guido Franceschini for the murder of his wife.  Out of this “mere ring metal,” Browning fashioned his “Ring,” a poem twice the length of Paradise Lost.