Further indications of his allegiance to the dramatic form of poetry as the supreme one are found in his poems inspired by Shakespeare, "House" and "Shop," but we must turn to a pregnant bit of his prose in order to find his exact feeling upon the relations of the subjective and objective poet, together with a clear conception of what he meant by a dramatic poet, which was something more than Shakespeare's "holding the mirror up to nature." In his view the dramatic poet must have the vision of the seer as well as the penetration of a psychologist. He must hold the mirror up not only to nature, regarded as phenomena, but to the human soul, and he must perceive the relation of that human soul to the universal. He must in fact plunge beneath the surface of actions and events and bring forth to the light the psychic and cosmic causes of these things. The passage referred to in the "Introduction to the Shelley Letters" points out how in the evolution of poetry there will be the play and interplay of the subjective and the objective faculties upon each other, with the probable result of the arising of poets who will combine the two sorts of faculty. While Browning's own sympathy with the dramatic poet is as fully evident here as in the passage in "Sordello," he realizes, as perhaps he did not at that time, when he was himself breaking away from Shelley's influence, the value of the subjective method in carrying on the process of poetic evolution: "It would be idle to inquire, of these two kinds of poetic faculty in operation, which is the higher or even rarer endowment. If the subjective might seem to be the ultimate requirement of every age, the objective, in the strictest state, must still retain its original value. For it is with this word, as starting-point and basis alike, that we shall always have to concern ourselves: the world is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned. The spiritual comprehension may be infinitely subtilized, but the raw material it operates upon must remain. There may be no end of the poets who communicate to us what they see in an object with reference to their own individuality; what it was before they saw it, in reference to the aggregate human mind, will be as desirable to know as ever. Nor is there any reason why these two modes of poetic faculty may not issue hereafter from the same poet in successive perfect works, examples of which, according to what are now considered the exigencies of art, we have hitherto possessed in distinct individuals only. A mere running in of the one faculty upon the other is, of course, the ordinary circumstance. Far more rarely it happens that either is found so decidedly prominent and superior as to be pronounced comparatively pure: while of the perfect shield, with the gold and the silver side set up for all comers to challenge, there has yet been no instance. A