studies in classical drama; secondly those, which in a greater or less degree, are connected with his summer wanderings in France and Switzerland.  The dream-scene of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is Leicester Square; but this also is one of the poems of France. The Inn Album alone is English in its characters and their surroundings.  Such a grouping of the works of the period is of a superficial nature, and it can be readily dismissed.  It brings into prominence, however, the fact that Browning, while resolved to work out what was in him, lay open to casual suggestions.  He had acquired certain methods which he could apply to almost any topic.  He had confidence that any subject on which he concentrated his powers of mind could be compelled to yield material of interest.  It cannot be said that he exercised always a wise discretion in the choice of subjects; these ought to have been excellent in themselves; he trusted too much to the successful issue of the play of his own intellect and imagination around and about his subjects. The Ring and the Book had given him practice, extending over several years, in handling the large dramatic monologue.  Now he was prepared to stretch the dramatic monologue beyond the bounds, and new devices were invented to keep it from stagnating and to carry it forward.  Imaginary disputants intervene in the monologue; there are objections, replies, retorts; a second player in the game not being found, the speaker has to play against himself.

In the story of the Roman murder-case fancy was mingled with fact, and truth with falsehood, with a view to making truth in the end the more salient.  The poet had used to the full his dramatic right of throwing himself into intellectual sympathy with persons towards whom he stood in moral antagonism or at least experienced an inward sense of alienation.  The characteristic of much of his later poetry is that it is for ever tasking falsehood to yield up truth, for ever (to employ imagery of his own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water with the feet in order that the head may rise higher into the pure air made for the spirit’s breathing.  Browning’s genius united an intellect which delighted in the investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature manifesting itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it united an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an intuitive power springing from the heart.  He employed his brain to twist and tangle a Gordian knot in order that in a moment it might be cut with the sword of the spirit.  In the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and intuitions were often present throughout, and without latency, without reserve; impassioned truth often flashed upon the reader through no intervening or resisting medium.  In The Ring and the Book, and in a far greater degree in some subsequent poems, while the supreme authority resides in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart, their instantaneous, decisive