They are not dramatic.  Their action and ideas are confined to one person, and their circumstance and scenery to one time and place.  But Browning, unlike Tennyson, filled the background of the stage on which he placed his single figure with a multitude of objects, or animals, or natural scenery, or figures standing round or in motion; and these give additional vitality and interest to the representation.  Again, they are short, as short as a soliloquy or a letter or a conversation in a street.  Shortness belongs to this form of poetic work—­a form to which Browning gave a singular intensity.  It follows that they must not be argumentative beyond what is fitting.  Nor ought they to glide into the support of a thesis, or into didactic addresses, as Bishop Blougram and Mr. Sludge do.  These might be called treatises, and are apart from the kind of poem of which I speak.  They begin, indeed, within its limits, but they soon transgress those limits; and are more properly classed with poems which, also representative, have not the brevity, the scenery, the lucidity, the objective representation, the concentration of the age into one man’s mind, which mark out these poems from the rest, and isolate them into a class of their own.

The voice we hear in them is rarely the voice of Browning; nor is the mind of their personages his mind, save so far as he is their creator.  There are a few exceptions to this, but, on the whole, Browning has, in writing these poems, stripped himself of his own personality.  He had, by creative power, made these men; cast them off from himself, and put them into their own age.  They talk their minds out in character with their age.  Browning seems to watch them, and to wonder how they got out of his hands and became men.  That is the impression they make, and it predicates a singular power of imagination.  Like the Prometheus of Goethe, the poet sits apart, moulding men and then endowing them with life.  But he cannot tell, any more than Prometheus, what they will say and do after he has made them.  He does tell, of course, but that is not our impression.  Our impression is that they live and talk of their own accord, so vitally at home they are in the country, the scenery, and the thinking of the place and time in which he has imagined them.

Great knowledge seems required for this, and Browning had indeed an extensive knowledge not so much of the historical facts, as of the tendencies of thought which worked in the times wherein he placed his men.  But the chief knowledge he had, through his curious reading, was of a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing, architecture, dress, popular talk and scenery of the towns and country of Italy from the thirteenth century up to modern times.  To every one of these details—­such as are found in Sordello, in Fra Lippo Lippi, in the Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church—­his vivid and grasping imagination gave an uncommon reality.