Not directly, then, but indirectly, as the dramatic poet ever reveals himself, does the sophisticated face of the subtle poet of “Men and Women” appear as the source of power behind both of the poets of this poem, prepossessing the reader of the verity and beauty of the theory of poetic art therein exemplified.  Such an interpretation of “Transcendentalism,” and such a conception of it as a key to the art of the volume it opens, chimes in harmoniously with the note sounded in the next following poem, “How it Strikes a Contemporary.”  Here again a typical poet is personified, not, however, by means of his own poetic way of seeing, but of the prosaic way in which he is seen by a contemporary, the whole, of course, being poetically seen and presented by the over-poet.  Browning himself, and in such a manifold way that the reader is enabled to conceive as vividly of the talker and his mental atmosphere and social background—­the people and habitudes of the good old town of Valladolid—­as of the betalked-of Corregidor himself; while by the totality of these concrete images an impression is conveyed of the dramatic mode of poetic expression which is far more convincing than any explicit theoretic statement of it could be, because so humanly animated.

“Artemis Prologizes” seems to have been selected to close this little opening sequence of poems on the poet, because that fragment of a larger projected work could find place here almost as if it were a poet’s exercise in blank verse.  Its smooth and spacious rhythm, flawless and serene as the distant Greek myth of the hero and the goddess it celebrates, is in striking contrast with the rougher, but brighter and more humanly colloquial blank verse of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology,” for example, or the stiff carefulness of the “Epistle” of Karshish.  It might alone suffice, by comparison with the metrical craftsmanship of the other poems of “Men and Women,” to assure the observant reader that never was a good workman more baselessly accused of metrical carelessness than the poet who designedly varies his complicated verse-effects to suit every inner impulse belonging to his dramatic subject.  A golden finish being in place in this statuesque, “Hyperion"-like monologue of Artemis, behold here it is, and none the less perfect because not merely the outcome of the desire to produce a polished piece of poetic mechanism.

Browning, perhaps, linked his next poem, “The Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” with the calm prologizing of the Hellenic goddess, by association of the “wise pharmacies” of AEsculapius, with the inquisitive sagacity of Karshish, “the not-incurious in God’s handiwork.”  By this ordering of the poems, the reader may now enjoy, at any rate, the contrasts between three historic phases of wisdom in bodily ills:  the phase presented in the dependence of the old Greek healer upon simple physical effects, soothing “with lavers the torn brow,” and laying “the stripes and jagged