d irradiated by dramatic power--but thoughts, impressions,
experiences, impulses, no matter how spiritualized or complex or
mobile, are transfused with the enlivening light of his creative
energy in his shorter poems. Perhaps the very path struck out
through them by the poet in his re-division may be traced between
the leaves silently closing together again behind him if it be
noticed that among these poems there are some with footholds firmly
rooted in the earth and others whose proper realm is air. These have
wings for alighting, for flitting thither and hither, or for
pursuing some sudden rapt whirl of flight in Heaven's face at
fancy's bidding. They are certainly not less original than those
other solider, earth-fast poems, but they are less unique. Being
motived in transient fancy, they are more akin to poems by other
hands, and could be classed more readily with them by any observer,
despite all differences, as little poetic romances or as a species
of lyric.

They were probably first found praiseworthy, not only because they
were simpler, but because, being more like work already understood
and approved, adventurous criticism was needed to taste their
quality. The other longer poems in blank verse, graver and more
dignified, yet even more vivid, and far more life-encompassing,
which bore the rounded impress of the living human being, instead of
the shadowy motion of the lively human fancy--these are the birth of
a process of imaginative brooding upon the development of man by
means of individuality throughout the slow, unceasing flow of human
history. Browning evidently grew aware that whatever these poems of
personality might prove to be worth to the world, these were the
ones deserving of a place apart, under the early title of "Men and
Women," which he thought especially suited to the more roundly
modelled and distinctively colored exemplars of his peculiar
faculty.

In his next following collection, under the similar descriptive
title of "Dramatis Personae," he added to this class of work,
shaping in the mould of blank verse mainly used for "Men and Women"
his personifications of the Medium Mr. Sludge, the embryo theologian
Caliban, the ripened mystical saint of "A Death in the Desert";
while Abt Vogler, the creative musician, Rabbi ben Ezra, the
intuitional philosopher, and the chastened adept in loving, James
Lee's wife, although held within the embrace of their maker's
dramatic conception of them, as p