his characters.

In a word, Shakspere's method is to depict a human soul in action, with
all the pertinent play of circumstance, while Browning's is to portray
the processes of its mental and spiritual development: as he said in his
dedicatory preface to "Sordello," "little else is worth study." The one
electrifies us with the outer and dominant actualities; the other
flashes upon our mental vision the inner, complex, shaping
potentialities. The one deals with life dynamically, the other with life
as Thought. Both methods are compassed by art. Browning, who is above
all modern writers the poet of dramatic situations, is surpassed by many
of inferior power in continuity of dramatic sequence. His finest work is
in his dramatic poems, rather than in his dramas. He realised intensely
the value of quintessential moments, as when the Prefect in "The Return
of the Druses" thrusts aside the arras, muttering that for the first
time he enters without a sense of imminent doom, "no draught coming as
from a sepulchre" saluting him, while that moment the dagger of the
assassin plunges to his heart: or, further in the same poem, when Anael,
coming to denounce Djabal as an impostor, is overmastered by her
tyrannic love, and falls dead with the too bitter freight of her
emotion, though not till she has proclaimed him the God by her single
worshipping cry, _Hakeem!_--or, once more, in "The Ring and the Book,"
where, with the superbest close of any dramatic poem in our literature,
the wretched Guido, at the point of death, cries out in the last
extremity not upon God or the Virgin, but upon his innocent and
murdered wife--"Abate,--Cardinal,--Christ,--Maria,--God, ... Pompilia,
will you let them murder me?" Thus we can imagine Browning, with his
characteristic perception of the profound significance of a circumstance
or a single word even, having written of the knocking at the door in
"Macbeth," or having used, with all its marvellous cumulative effect,
the word 'wrought' towards the close of "Othello," when the Moor cries
in his bitterness of soul, "But being wrought, perplext in the extreme":
we can imagine this, and yet could not credit the suggestion that even
the author of "The Ring and the Book" could by any possibility have
composed the two most moving tragedies writ in our tongue.

In the late autumn of 1832 Browning wrote a poem of singular promise and
beauty, though immature in thought and crude in expression.[6]
Thirty-four yea