n that!' From these
disjointed utterances the reader would have to construct the story."
Here our critic's clever ingenuity carries him a little too far; but
there is some truth in his definition or description of the special
manner which characterises such poems as _Too Late_, or _The Worst of
It_. But not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also
the style and versification, have undergone a change during the
long-silent years which lie between _Men and Women_ and _Dramatis
Personae_. The first note of change, of the change which makes us speak
of earlier and later work, is here sounded. From 1833 up to 1855 forms a
single period of steady development, of gradual and unswerving ascent.
_Dramatis Personae_ stands on the border line between this period and
another, the "later period," which more decisively begins with _The Ring
and the Book_. Still, the first note of divergence is certainly sounded
here. I might point to the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces
as its characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an
apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very
marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and modern rather
than of mediaeval and foreign life.

The larger part of the volume consists of dramatic monologues. Three
only are in blank verse; the greater number in varied lyric measures.
The first of these, and the longest, _James Lee_, as it was first
called, _James Lee's Wife_[36] as it is now more appropriately named, is
a _Lieder Kreis_, or cycle of songs, nine in number, which reveal, in
"tragic hints," not by means of a connected narrative, the history of an
unhappy marriage. There is nothing in it of heroic action or suffering;
it is one of those old stories always new which are always tragic to one
at least of the actors in them, and which may be tragic or trivial in
record, according as the artist is able to mould his material. Each of
the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of
circumstance which may the better enable us to grasp it. The development
of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated
in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear
strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear),
through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, to the final
resolved parting. This poem is worthy of notice as the only one in which
Browning has em