It was during the month of the coup d’etat that Browning went back in thought to the poet of his youthful love, and wrote that essay which was prefixed to the volume of forged letters published as Shelley’s by Moxon in 1852.  The essay is interesting as Browning’s only considerable piece of prose, and also as an utterance made not through the mask of any dramatis persona, but openly and directly from his own lips.  Though not without value as a contribution to the study of Shelley’s genius, it is perhaps chiefly of importance as an exposition of some of Browning’s own views concerning his art.  He distinguishes between two kinds or types of poet:  the poet who like Shakespeare is primarily the “fashioner” of things independent of his own personality, artistic creations which embody some fact or reality, leaving it to others to interpret, as best they are able, its significance; and secondly the poet who is rather a “seer” than a fashioner, who attempts to exhibit in imaginative form his own conceptions of absolute truth, conceptions far from entire adequacy, yet struggling towards completeness; the poet who would shadow forth, as he himself apprehends them, Ideas, to use the word of Plato, “seeds of creation lying burningly on the Divine Hand”—­which Ideas he discovers not so often in the external world as in his own soul, this being for him “the nearest reflex of the absolute Mind.”  What a poet of this second kind produces, as Browning finely states it, will be less a work than an effluence.  He is attracted among external phenomena chiefly by those which summon forth his inner light and power, “he selects that silence of the earth and sea in which he can best hear the beating of his individual heart, and leaves the noisy, complex, yet imperfect exhibitions of nature in the manifold experience of man around him, which serve only to distract and suppress the working of his brain.”  To this latter class of poets, although in The Cenci and Julian and Maddalo he is eminent as a “fashioner,” Shelley conspicuously belongs.  Mankind cannot wisely dispense with the services of either type of poet; at one time it chiefly needs to have that which is already known interpreted into its highest meanings; and at another, when the virtue of these interpretations has been appropriated and exhausted, it needs a fresh study and exploration of the facts of life and nature—­for “the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”  The truest and highest point of view from which to regard the poetry of Shelley is that which shows it as a “sublime fragmentary essay towards a presentment of the correspondency of the universe to Deity, of the natural to the spiritual, and of the actual to the ideal.”