"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and Popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low estate--men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them." The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from, yet revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr. Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of the universe, a centre of creation." It is always the particular soul, and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the particular soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test--in which he interests us. With him it is always "a drama of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes conscious of itself." In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello, Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else seems worth study except the development of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that. And, [45] in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees with him. It is because he has ministered with such marvellous vigour, and variety, and fine skill to this interest, that he is the most modern, to modern people the most important, of poets. So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry. "These extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola" and "Porphyria's Lover"-- "Reveal not only an imagination of intense fire and heat, but an almost finished art--a power of conceiving subtle mental complexities with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque form and in perfect lyric language. Each poem renders a single mood, and renders it completely." Well, after all, that is true of a large portion of Mr. Browning's work. A curious, an erudite artist, certainly, he is to some extent an experimenter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous. But in spite of the dramatic rudeness which is sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists, Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself--tender, manly, humorous, awe-stricken--when speaking in his own proper person. Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul, in the characteristic episodes of its development is a wholly new range of poetic subject in which Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons tells us:--