and the range is such as no other English
poet has perhaps ever covered in a single book of miscellaneous poems.

In _Men and Women_ Browning's special instrument, the monologue, is
brought to perfection. Such monologues as _Andrea del Sarto_ or the
_Epistle of Karshish_ never have been, and probably never will be
surpassed, on their own ground, after their own order. To conceive a
drama, to present every side and phase and feature of it from one point
of view, to condense all its potentialities of action, all its
significance and import, into some few hundred lines, this has been done
by but one poet, and nowhere with such absolute perfection as here. Even
when dealing with a single emotion, Browning usually crystallizes it
into a choice situation; and almost every poem in the series, down to
the smallest lyric, is essentially a dramatic monologue. But perhaps the
most striking instances of the form and method, and, with the little
drama of _In a Balcony_, the principal poems in the collection, are the
five blank verse pieces, _Andrea del Sarto_, _Fra Lippo Lippi_, _Cleon_,
_Karshish_, and _Bishop Blougram_. Each is a masterpiece of poetry. Each
is in itself a drama, and contains the essence of a life, condensed into
a single episode, or indicated in a combination of discourse,
conversation, argument, soliloquy, reminiscence. Each, besides being the
presentation of a character, moves in a certain atmosphere of its own,
philosophical, ethical, or artistic. _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Fra Lippo
Lippi_ deal with art. _Cleon_ and _Karshish_, in a sense companion
poems, are concerned, each secondarily, with the arts and physical
sciences, primarily with the attitude of the Western and Eastern worlds
when confronted with the problem of the Gospel of Christ. _Bishop
Blougram_ is modern, ecclesiastical and argumentative. But however
different in form and spirit, however diverse in _milieu_, each is alike
the record of a typical soul at a typical moment.

_Andrea del Sarto_ is a "translation into song" of the picture known as
"Andrea del Sarto and his Wife," in the Pitti Palace at Florence. The
story of Andrea del Sarto is told by Vasari, in one of the best known of
his _Lives_: how the painter, who at one time seemed as if he might have
competed with Raphael, was ruined, as artist and as man, by his
beautiful, soulless wife, the fatal Lucrezia del Fede; and how, led and
lured by her, he outraged his conscience, lowered his ideal,