In 1864 Dramatis Personae was published.  It might be described as virtually a third volume of Men and Women.  And yet a certain change of tone is discernible.  Italy is no longer the background of the human figures.  There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold “joys of living.”  If higher points in the life of the spirit are not touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before; there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem adverse to the life of the soul.  In the poems which deal with love the situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in passages of A Death in the Desert, which had hardly been reached before.  Yet substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except in one instance, where Tennyson’s method in Maud, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating themes of Men and Women, love, art, religion, are the predominating themes of Dramatis Personae. A slight metrical complication—­the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of Dis aliter visum and in the third line of the quatrains of May and Death—­may be noted as indicating Browning’s love of new metrical experiments.  In the former of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of sounds, “a mass of brass,” “walked and talked,” and the like, seems too much as if an accident had been converted into a rule.

Mr Sludge, “the Medium” the longest piece in the volume, has been already noticed.  The story of the poor girl of Pornic, as Browning in a letter calls her, attracted him partly because it presented a psychological curiosity, partly because he cared to paint her hair in words,—­gold in contrast with that pallid face—­as much as his friend Rossetti might have wished to display a like splendour with the strokes of his brush: 

    Hair such a wonder of flix and floss,
    Freshness and fragrance—­floods of it too! 
    Gold, did I say?  Nay, gold’s mere dross.

The story, which might gratify a cynical observer of human nature, is treated by Browning without a touch of cynicism, except that ascribed to the priest—­good easy man—­who has lost a soul and gained an altar.  A saint manque, whose legend is gruesome enough, but more pathetic than gruesome, becomes for the poet an involuntary witness of the Christian faith, and a type of the mystery of moral evil; but the psychological contrasts of the ambiguous creature, saint-sinner, and the visual contrast of

     that face, like a silver wedge
    ’Mid the yellow wealth,

are of more worth than the sermon which the writer preaches in exposition of his tale.  Had the form of the poem been Browning’s favourite dramatic monologue, we can imagine that an ingenious apologia, convincing at least to Half-Pornic, could have been offered for the perversity of the dying girl’s rifting every golden tress with gold.