I had only lately read Shelley’s great tragedy, and Mrs. Jameson had been so good as to lend me various notices and criticisms upon it.  The hideous subject itself is its weak point, and his selection of it one cause for doubting Shelley’s power as a dramatic writer.  Everything else in the terrible play suggests the probable loss his death may have been to the dramatic literature of England.  At the same time, the tenor of all his poems denotes a mind too unfamiliar with human life and human nature in their ordinary normal aspects and conditions for a good writer of plays.  His metaphysical was almost too much for his poetical imagination, and perhaps nothing between the morbid horror of that Cenci story and the ideal grandeur of the Greek Prometheus would have excited him to the dramatic handling of any subject.

His translation from Calderon’s “El Magico Prodigioso,” and his bit of the Brocken scene from “Faust,” are fine samples of his power of dramatic style; he alone could worthily have translated the whole of “Faust;” but I suppose he really was too deficient in the vigorous flesh-and-blood vitality of the highest and healthiest poetical genius to have been a dramatist.  He could not deal with common folk nor handle common things; humor, that great tragic element, was not in him; the heavens and all their clouds and colors were his, and he floated and hovered and soared in the ethereal element like one native to it.  Upon the firm earth his foot wants firmness, and men and women as they are, are at once too coarse and complex, too robust and too infinitely various for his delicate, fine, but in some sense feeble handling.

Browning is the very reverse of Shelley in this respect; both have written one fine play and several fine dramatic compositions; but throughout Shelley’s poetry the dramatic spirit is deficient, while in Browning’s it reveals itself so powerfully that one wonders how he has escaped writing many good plays besides the “Blot on the Scutcheon” and that fine fragmentary succession of scenes, “Pippa Passes.”

                                                 GREAT RUSSELL STREET. 
     DEAR MRS. JAMESON,

I fear I am going to disappoint you, and ’tis with real regret that I do so, but I have been acting every night almost for the last month, and when to-day I mentioned my project of spending this my holiday evening with you, both my aunt and my father seemed to think that in discharging my debt to you I was defrauding nearer and older creditors; and suggested that my mother, who really sees but little of me now, might think my going out to-night unkind.  I cannot, therefore, carry out my plan of visiting you, and beg that you will forgive my not keeping my promise this evening.  I am moreover so far from well that my company would hardly give you much pleasure, nor could I stay long if I came, for early as it is my head is aching for its pillow already.