With 'Sordello,' however, ended for many years--until he may perhaps be said to have taken it up in a greatly disciplined and more powerful form in 'The Ring and the Book' and others--this type and this length of the psychological poem for Browning; and now began that part of his work which is his best gift to English literature. Four years before the publication of 'Sordello' he had written one play, 'Strafford,' of which the name sufficiently indicates the subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by Macready;--the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always in chronological order. They were 'The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,' perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; 'Colombe's Birthday'; 'King Victor and King Charles'; 'The Return of the Druses'; 'Luria'; 'A Soul's Tragedy'; 'In a Balcony'; and,--though less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,--perhaps the finest dramatic poem of them all, 'Pippa Passes,' which, among the earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers. Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and 1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points of a later general consideration.