This picture of the artist aspiring toward the absolute by means of his large human sympathy may be supplemented by the theory of man's relation to the universe involved in "Paracelsus" as we have seen. From this point in his work, Browning, like the Hindu Brahma, becomes manifest not as himself, but in his creations. The poet whose portrait is painted for us in "Pauline" is the same poet who sympathetically presents a whole world of human experiences to us, and the philosopher whose portrait is drawn in "Paracelsus" is the same who interprets these human experiences in the light of the great life theories therein presented. But as the creations of Brahma return into himself, so the human experiences Browning has entered into artistic sympathy with return to enrich his completed view of the problems of life, when, like his own Rabbi Ben Ezra, he reaches the last of life for which the first was planned in these "Fancies" and "Parleyings." Though these two groups of poems undoubtedly express the poet's own mature conclusions, they yet preserve the dramatic form. Several things are gained in this way: First, the poems are saved from didacticism, for the poet expresses his opinions as an individual, and not in his own person as a seer, trying to implant his theories in the minds of disciples. Second, variety is given and the mind stimulated by having opposite points of view presented, while the thought is infused with a certain amount of emotional force through the heat of argument. It has frequently been objected, not only of these poems, but upon general grounds, that philosophical and ethical problems are not fit subjects for treatment in poetry. There is one point which the critic of æsthetics seems in danger of never realizing--namely, that the law of evolution is differentiation, in art as well as in cosmic, organic, and social life. It is just as prejudiced and unforeseeing in these days to limit poetry to this or that kind of a subject, or to say that nothing is dramatic which does not deal with immediate action, as it would have been for Homer to declare that no poem would ever be worthy the name that did not contain a catalogue of ships. These facts exist! We have dramas dealing merely with action, dramas in which character development is of prime importance; dramas wherein action and character are entirely synchronous; and those in which the action means more than appears upon the surface, like Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell," or Ibsen's "Master Builder"; then why not dramas of thought and dramas of mood when the brain and heart become the stage of action instead of an actual stage. Surely such an extension of the possibilities of dramatic art is a development quite natural to the intellectual ferment of the nineteenth century. As the man in "Half Rome" says, "Facts are facts and lie not, and the question, 'How came that purse the poke o' you?' admits of no reply."