"The Past indeed Is past, gives way before Life's best and last The all-including Future! What were life Did soul stand still therein, forego her strife Through the ambiguous Present to the goal Of some all-reconciling Future? Soul, Nothing has been which shall not bettered be Hereafter,--leave the root, by law's decree Whence springs the ultimate and perfect tree! Busy thee with unearthing root? Nay, climb-- Quit trunk, branch, leaf and flower--reach, rest sublime Where fruitage ripens in the blaze of day." When it comes to the subject matter of poetry, Browning constantly insists that it should be the study of the human soul. A definite statement as to the range of subjects under this general material of poetry is put forth very early in his poetical career in "Paracelsus" and it is all-inclusive. It is the passage where Aprile describes how universal he wished to make his sympathy as a poet. No one is to be left out of his all-embracing democracy. Such, then, are his general principles in regard to poetic development and subject matter. These do not touch upon the question so often discussed of the relative value of the subjective as against the objective poet. This point the poet considers in "Sordello," where he throws in his weight on the side of the objective poet. In the passage in the third book the poet, speaking in person, gives illustrations of three sorts of poetic composition: the dramatic, the descriptive and the meditative; the first belongs to the objective, the second, not distinctively to either, and the third to the subjective manner of writing. The dramatic method is the most forceful, for it imparts the gift of seeing to others, while the descriptive and meditative merely tell what they saw, or, worse still, talk about it.