He chooses his subjects from abnormal character types, such as are presented, for example, in Caliban upon Setebos, the Grammarian’s Funeral, My Last Duchess and Mr. Sludge, the Medium.  These are all psychological studies, in which the poet gets into the inner consciousness of a monster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives their point of view.  They are dramatic soliloquies; but the poet’s self-identification with each of his creations, in turn, remains incomplete.  His curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the monologues in his Dramatic Lyrics, 1845, Men and Women, 1855, Dramatis Personae, 1864, and other collections of the kind.  The words are the words of Caliban or Mr. Sludge; but the voice is the voice of Robert Browning.  His first complete poem, Paracelsus, 1835, aimed to give the true inwardness of the career of the famous 16th century doctor, whose name became a synonym with charlatan.  His second, Sordello, 1840, traced the struggles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and could not reconcile his life with his art. Paracelsus was hard, but Sordello was incomprehensible.  Browning has denied that he was ever perversely crabbed or obscure.  Every great artist must be allowed to say things in his own way, and obscurity has its artistic uses, as the Gothic builders knew.  But there are two kinds of obscurity in literature.  One is inseparable from the subtlety and difficulty of the thought or the compression and pregnant indirectness of the phrase.  Instances of this occur in the clear deeps of Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe.  The other comes from a vice of style, a willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of expressing thought.  Both kinds of obscurity exist in Browning.  He was a deep and subtle thinker, but he was also a very eccentric writer; abrupt, harsh, disjointed.  It has been well said that the reader of Browning learns a new dialect.  But one need not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an intellectual pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating.  The odd, grotesque impression made by his poetry arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid the shallow prettiness that comes from blinking the disagreeable truth:  not to leave the saltness out of the sea.  Whenever he emerges into clearness, as he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great qualities.  There are a fire and a swing in his Cavalier Tunes, and in pieces like the Glove and the Lost Leader; and humor in such ballads as the Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, which appeal to the most conservative reader.  He seldom deals directly in the pathetic, but now and then, as in Evelyn Hope, the Last Ride Together, or the Incident of the French Camp, a tenderness comes over the strong verse