So much has been written concerning the dramas of Robert Browning—­though indeed there is still room for a volume of careful criticism, dealing solely with this theme—­that I have the less regret in having so inadequately to pass in review works of such poetic magnitude as those enumerated above.

But it would be impossible, in so small a book as this, to examine them in detail without incurring a just charge of misproportion.  The greatness and the shortcomings of the dramas and dramatic poems must be noted as succinctly as practicable; and I have dwelt more liberally upon “Pauline,” “Paracelsus,” and “Strafford,” partly because (certainly without more than one exception, “Sordello”) these are the three least read of Browning’s poems, partly because they indicate the sweep and reach of his first orient eagle-flight through new morning-skies, and mainly because in them we already find Browning at his best and at his weakest, because in them we hear not only the rush of his sunlit pinions, but also the low earthward surge of dullard wings.

Browning is foreshadowed in his earliest writings, as perhaps no other poet has been to like extent.  In the “Venus and Adonis,” and the “Rape of Lucrece,” we have but the dimmest foreview of the author of “Hamlet,” “Othello,” and “Macbeth”; had Shakspere died prematurely none could have predicted, from the exquisite blossoms of his adolescence, the immortal fruit of his maturity.  But, in Browning’s three earliest works, we clearly discern him, as the sculptor of Melos provisioned his Venus in the rough-hewn block.

Thenceforth, to change the imagery, he developed rapidly upon the same lines, or doubled upon himself in intricate revolutions; but already his line of life, his poetic parallel, was definitely established.

In the consideration of Browning’s dramas it is needful to be sure of one’s vantage for judgment.  The first step towards this assurance is the ablation of the chronic Shaksperian comparison.  Primarily, the shaping spirit of the time wrought Shakspere and Browning to radically divergent methods of expression, but each to a method in profound harmony with the dominant sentiment of the age in which he lived.  Above all others, the Elizabethan era was rich in romantic adventure, of the mind as well as of the body, and above all others, save that of the Renaissance in Italy, animated by a passionate curiosity.  So, too, supremely, the Victorian era has been prolific of novel and vast Titanic struggles of the human spirit to reach those Gates of Truth whose lowest steps are the scarce discernible stars and furthest suns we scan, by piling Ossas of searching speculation upon Pelions of hardly-won positive knowledge.  The highest exemplar of the former is Shakspere, Browning the profoundest interpreter of the latter.  To achieve supremacy the one had to create a throbbing actuality, a world of keenest living, of acts and intervolved situations and episodes:  the other to fashion