hey laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."

Both kinds--drama and dramatic lyric--continued to attract him, while
neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently
throughout the decade.

In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and
laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no
nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which
illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the
great drama of history. To Landor, according to his wife's testimony,
Browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to
Landor he dedicated the last volume of the _Bells and Pomegranates_.
Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the "inquiring eye" and varied
discourse of a second Chaucer. It is hardly rash to connect with his
admiration for the elder artist Browning's predilection for these brief
revealing glimpses into the past. Browning cared less for the actual
_personnel_ of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their
talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the
expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more
spontaneous and naive, anti-feudal temper. The French camp and the
Spanish cloister, _Gismond_ and _My Last Duchess_ (originally called
_France_ and _Italy_), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages,
and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant
imagination and pronounced antipathies.

But in one point Landor and Browning stood at opposite poles. Landor,
far beyond any contemporary English example, had the classic sense and
mastery of style; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust
indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech. The
wave of realism which swept over English letters in the early 'Forties
broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said
demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was
rendered in sordid, grotesque, and homely terms. _Pickwick_ in 1837 had
established the immense vogue of Dickens, the _Heroes_ in 1840 had
assured the imposing prestige of Carlyle; and the example of both made
for the freest and boldest use of language. Across the Channel the
stupendous fabric of the _Comedie Humaine_ was approaching completion,
and Browning was one of Balzac's keenest English reader