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, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity,
tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics,
scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of
low estate, men and women as multiform as nature or society has made
them. He has found and studied humanity, not only in English tow