To me this children's-song and the fleeting and now plaintive echo of it, as "Voices from Within" -- "Verso la sera, Di Primavera" -- in the terrible scene where Strafford learns his doom, is only to be paralleled by the song of Mariana in "Measure for Measure", wherein, likewise, is abduced in one thrilling poignant strain the quintessential part of the tense life of the whole play. So much has been written concerning the dramas of Robert Browning -- though indeed there is still room for a volume of careful criticism, dealing solely with this theme -- that I have the less regret in having so inadequately to pass in review works of such poetic magnitude as those enumerated above. But it would be impossible, in so small a book as this, to examine them in detail without incurring a just charge of misproportion. The greatness and the shortcomings of the dramas and dramatic poems must be noted as succinctly as practicable; and I have dwelt more liberally upon "Pauline", "Paracelsus", and "Strafford", partly because (certainly without more than one exception, "Sordello") these are the three least read of Browning's poems, partly because they indicate the sweep and reach of his first orient eagle-flight through new morning-skies, and mainly because in them we already find Browning at his best and at his weakest, because in them we hear not only the rush of his sunlit pinions, but also the low earthward surge of dullard wings. Browning is foreshadowed in his earliest writings, as perhaps no other poet has been to like extent. In the "Venus and Adonis", and the "Rape of Lucrece", we have but the dimmest foreview of the author of "Hamlet", "Othello", and "Macbeth"; had Shakespeare died prematurely none could have predicted, from the exquisite blossoms of his adolescence, the immortal fruit of his maturity. But, in Browning's three earliest works, we clearly discern him, as the sculptor of Melos previsioned his Venus in the rough-hewn block. Thenceforth, to change the imagery, he developed rapidly upon the same lines, or doubled upon himself in intricate revolutions; but already his line of life, his poetic parallel, was definitely established.