interest and importance; but he catches the energy which spirit transfers to spirit less in the actual moment of transference than after it has arrived.  Thought and emotion with him do not circulate freely through a group of persons, receiving some modification from each.  He deals most successfully with each individual as a single and separate entity; each maintains his own attitude, and as he is touched by the common influence he proceeds to scrutinise it.  Mind in these plays threads its way dexterously in and out of action; it is not itself sufficiently incorporated in action.  The progress of the drama is now retarded; and again, as if the author perceived that the story had fallen behind or remained stationary, it is accelerated by sudden jerks.  A dialogue of retrospection is a common device at the opening of popular plays, with a view to expound the position of affairs to the audience; but a dramatic writer of genius usually works forward through his dialogue to the end which he has set before him.  With Browning for the purpose of mental analysis a dialogue of retrospection may be of higher value than one which leans and presses towards the future.  The invisible is for him more important than the visible; and so in truth it may often be; but the highest dramatist will not choose to separate the two.  The invisible is best captured and is most securely held in the visible.

As a writer of drama, Browning, who delights to study the noblest attitudes of the soul, and to wring a proud sense of triumph out of apparent failure, finds his proper field in tragedy rather than in comedy. Colombe’s Birthday has a joyous ending, but the joy is very grave and earnest, and the body of the play is made up of serious pleadings and serious hopes and fears.  There is no light-hearted mirth, no real gaiety of temper anywhere in the dramas of Browning.  Pippa’s gladness in her holiday from the task of silk-winding is touched with pathos in the thought that what is so bright is also so brief, and it is encompassed, even within delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world.  Bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyme is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits.  The genial cynicism of Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception, who with long experience of human infirmities, has come to chuckle gently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not—­we may ask—­wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of worldly wisdom?  No—­this is not gaiety; if Browning smiles with his Ogniben, his smile is a comment upon the weakness and the blindness of the self-deceiver.