The first of these difficulties arises from the extent and variety of his work.  He was prodigal of poetic ideas, and wrote for fifty years on nature, art, and man, like a magnificent spendthrift of spiritual treasures.  So great a store of knowledge lay at his hand, so real and informed with sympathy, that we can scarcely find any great literature which he has not ransacked, any phase of life which is not represented in his poems.  All kinds of men and women, in every station in life, and at every stage of evil and goodness, crowd his pages.  There are few forms of human character he has not studied, and each individual he has so caught at the supreme moment of his life, and in the hardest stress of circumstance, that the inmost working of his nature is revealed.  The wealth is bewildering, and it is hard to follow the central thought, “the imperial chord, which steadily underlies the accidental mists of music springing thence."[A]

[Footnote A:  Fifine at the Fair.]

A second and still graver difficulty lies in the fact that his poetry, as he repeatedly insisted, is “always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine."[B] In his earlier works, especially, Browning is creative rather than reflective, a Maker rather than a Seer; and his creations stand aloof from him, working out their fate in an outer world.  We often lose the poet in the imaginative characters, into whom he penetrates with his keen artistic intuition, and within whom he lies as a necessity revealing itself in their actions and words.  It is not easy anywhere to separate the elements, so that we can say with certainty, “Here I catch the poet, there lies his material.”  The identification of the work and worker is too intimate, and the realization of the imaginary personage is too complete.

[Footnote B:  Pref. to Pauline, 1888.]

In regard to the dramatic interpretation of his poetry, Browning has manifested a peculiar sensitiveness.  In his Preface to Pauline and in several of his poems—­notably The Mermaid, the House, and the Shop—­he explicitly cuts himself free from his work.  He knew that direct self-revealment on the part of the poet violates the spirit of the drama.  “With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” said Wordsworth; “Did Shakespeare?” characteristically answers Browning, “If so, the less Shakespeare he!” And of himself he asks: 

  “Which of you did I enable
    Once to slip inside my breast,
  There to catalogue and label
    What I like least, what love best,
  Hope and fear, believe and doubt of,
    Seek and shun, respect—­deride? 
  Who has right to make a rout of
    Rarities he found inside?"[A]

[Footnote A:  At the Mermaid.]

He repudiates all kinship with Byron and his subjective ways, and refuses to be made king by the hands which anointed him.  “He will not give his woes an airing, and has no plague that claims respect.”  Both as man and poet, in virtue of the native, sunny, outer-air healthiness of his character, every kind of subjectivity is repulsive to him.  He hands to his readers “his work, his scroll, theirs to take or leave:  his soul he proffers not.”  For him “shop was shop only”; and though he dealt in gems, and throws