That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is therefore poetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order.  So great a power have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears.  And if any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a piano, an old door.

In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama The Return of the Druses, a work which contains more of Browning’s typical qualities exhibited in an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted.  We have in The Return of the Druses his love of the corners of history, his interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be an Oriental himself.  But, above all, it presents the first rise of that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to pursue.  In Pauline and the poems that follow it, Browning has only the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself.  In Pippa Passes he has the only less easy task of giving an account of humanity.  In The Return of the Druses he has for the first time the task which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity—­the task of giving an account of a human being.  Djabal, the great Oriental impostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarly subtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions of Godhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings:  he is a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity.  He is supremely important in the history of Browning’s mind, for he is the first of that great series of the apologiae of apparently evil men, on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginative wealth—­Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of Fifine at the Fair.

With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, he enters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours—­the defence of the indefensible.  It may be noticed that Browning was not in the least content with the fact that certain human frailties had always lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all human sentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that a drunkard might be high-minded.  He was insatiable:  he wished to go further and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might be generous and that