In a word, Shakspere’s method is to depict a human soul in action, with all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning’s is to portray the processes of its mental and spiritual development:  as he said in his dedicatory preface to “Sordello,” “little else is worth study.”  The one electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities; the other flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex, shaping potentialities.  The one deals with life dynamically, the other with life as Thought.  Both methods are compassed by art.  Browning, who is above all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations, is surpassed by many of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence.  His finest work is in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas.  He realised intensely the value of quintessential moments, as when the Prefect in “The Return of the Druses” thrusts aside the arras, muttering that for the first time he enters without a sense of imminent doom, “no draught coming as from a sepulchre” saluting him, while that moment the dagger of the assassin plunges to his heart:  or, further in the same poem, when Anael, coming to denounce Djabal as an impostor, is overmastered by her tyrannic love, and falls dead with the too bitter freight of her emotion, though not till she has proclaimed him the God by her single worshipping cry, Hakeem!—­or, once more, in “The Ring and the Book,” where, with the superbest close of any dramatic poem in our literature, the wretched Guido, at the point of death, cries out in the last extremity not upon God or the Virgin, but upon his innocent and murdered wife—­“Abate,—­Cardinal,—­Christ,—­Maria,—­God, ...  Pompilia, will you let them murder me?” Thus we can imagine Browning, with his characteristic perception of the profound significance of a circumstance or a single word even, having written of the knocking at the door in “Macbeth,” or having used, with all its marvellous cumulative effect, the word ‘wrought’ towards the close of “Othello,” when the Moor cries in his bitterness of soul, “But being wrought, perplext in the extreme”:  we can imagine this, and yet could not credit the suggestion that even the author of “The Ring and the Book” could by any possibility have composed the two most moving tragedies writ in our tongue.

In the late autumn of 1832 Browning wrote a poem of singular promise and beauty, though immature in thought and crude in expression.[6] Thirty-four years later he included “Pauline” in his “Poetical Works” with reluctance, and in a note explained the reason of his decision—­namely, to forestall piratical reprints abroad.  “The thing was my earliest attempt at ’poetry always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine,’ which I have since written according to a scheme less extravagant, and scale less impracticable, than were ventured upon in this crude preliminary sketch—­a sketch that, on reviewal, appears not altogether wide of some hint of the characteristic