This was to be notably the method of ‘Sordello,’ which appeared in 1840.  In a note written twenty-three years later to his friend Milsand, and prefixed as a dedication to ‘Sordello’ in his collected works, he defined the form and its reason most exactly:—­“The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires, and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study.”  This poem, with its “historical decoration” or “background” from the Guelf and Ghibelline struggles in Italy, carries out this design in a fashion that defies description or characterization.  With its inexhaustible wealth of psychological suggestion, its interwoven discussion of the most complex problems of life and thought, its metaphysical speculation, it may well give pause to the reader who makes his first approach to Browning through it, and send him back,—­if he begins, as is likely, with the feeling of one challenged to an intellectual task,—­baffled by the intricacy of its ways and without a comprehension of what it contains or leads to.  Mr. Augustine Birrell says of it:—­

“We have all heard of the young architect who forgot to put a staircase in his house, which contained fine rooms but no way of getting into them.  ‘Sordello’ is a poem without a staircase.  The author, still in his twenties, essayed a high thing.  For his subject

     ’He singled out
     Sordello compassed murkily about
     With ravage of six long sad hundred years.’

“He partially failed; and the British public, with its accustomed generosity, and in order, I suppose, to encourage the others, has never ceased girding at him because, forty-two years ago, he published at his own charges a little book of two hundred and fifty pages, which even such of them as were then able to read could not understand.”

With ‘Sordello,’ however, ended for many years—­until he may perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and more powerful form in ‘The Ring and the Book’ and others—­this type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English literature.

Four years before the publication of ‘Sordello’ he had written one play, ‘Strafford,’ of which the name sufficiently indicates the subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by Macready;—­the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always in chronological order.  They were ’The Blot on the ‘Scutcheon,’ perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; ‘Colombe’s Birthday’; ’King Victor and King Charles’; ‘The Return of the Druses’; ‘Luria’; ’A Soul’s Tragedy’; ‘In a Balcony’; and,—­though less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,—­perhaps the finest dramatic poem of them all, ‘Pippa Passes,’ which, among the earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all Browning’s works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.