Browning’s aim, then, being to see how each soul conceives of itself, and to exhibit its essential qualities, yet without complication of incident, it is his frequent practice to reveal the soul to itself by the application of a sudden test, which shall condense the long trial of years into a single moment, and so “flash the truth out by one blow.”  To this practice we owe his most vivid and notable work.  “The poetry of Robert Browning,” says Pater, “is pre-eminently the poetry of situations.”  He selects a character, no matter how uninteresting in itself, and places it in some situation where its vital essence may become apparent, in some crisis of conflict or opportunity.  The choice of good or evil is open to it, and in perhaps a single moment its fate will be decided.  When a soul plays dice with the devil there is only a second in which to win or lose; but the second may be worth an eternity.  These moments of intense significance, these tremendous spiritual crises, are struck out in Browning’s poetry with a clearness and sharpness of outline that no other poet has achieved.  “To realise such a situation, to define in a chill and empty atmosphere the focus where rays, in themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has to employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought and passion a thousand fold....  Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive from it the impression of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act."[3]

It is as a result of this purpose, in consonance with this practice, that we get in Browning’s works so large a number of distinct human types, and so great a variety of surroundings in which they are placed.  Only in Shakespeare can we find anything like the same variety of distinct human characters, vital creations endowed with thoughtful life; and not even, perhaps, in Shakespeare, such novelty and variety of milieu.  There is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge.  Passing by the legendary and remote ages and civilisations of East and West, he has painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of Socrates and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight age between Paganism and Christianity, and recorded the last utterance of the last apostle of the now-conquering creed; he has distilled the very essence of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the very essence of the modern world.  The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the wicked witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent greybeards,