ether the remaining
time was spent in a cave or in a court; strength may encounter the
seductions either of the hermitage or of the crowd and still be the
victor:

Strength may conclude in Archelaos' court,
And yet esteem the silken company
So much sky-scud, sea-froth, earth-thistledown,
For aught their praise or blame should joy or grieve.
Strength amid crowds as late in solitude
May lead the still life, ply the wordless task.[90]

One cannot prescribe a hygiene to poets; the poet of passionate
contemplation, such as was Wordsworth, could hardly quicken or develop
his peculiar faculty by devotion to the entertainments of successive
London seasons. And perhaps it is not certain that the genius of
Browning was wholly a gainer by the superficial excitations of the
dinner table and the reception room. But the truth is, as Mrs Browning
had observed, that his energy was not exhausted by literary work, and
that it preyed upon himself if no means of escape were found. If he was
not at the piano, or shaping clay, or at the drawing-board, or walking
fast and far, inward disturbances were set up which rent and frayed his
mind. The pleasures of society both fatigued and rested Browning; they
certainly relieved him from the troubles of super-abundant force.

In 1864 _Dramatis Personae_ was published. It might be described as
virtually a third volume of _Men and Women_. And yet a certain change of
tone is discernible. Italy is no longer the background of the human
figures. There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold
"joys of living." If higher points in the life of the spirit are not
touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more
detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before;
there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem
adverse to the life of the soul. In the poems which deal with love the
situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes
even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a
plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in passages of _A
Death in the Desert_, which had hardly been reached before. Yet
substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except
in one instance, where Tennyson's method in _Maud_, that of a sequence
of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating
themes of _Men and Women_, love, art, religion, a