But he was the example of a spirit with which the whole age was filled to saturation. Almost all the nineteenth century poets of England are subjective, giving us their own experience, sentiments, reflections, philosophies. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, revolve in this enchanted and enchanting circle. Keats and Coleridge seem capable of something different. So, in the double star, made up of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the first is absolutely personal and lyric, the second sometimes objective and dramatic. And in that other double star of Shelley and Keats the same difference may be noted. A still more striking instance of the combination of these antagonisms is to be found in our time, in Robert Browning and his wife. Mrs. Browning is wholly lyric, like a bird which sings its own tender song of love and hope and faith till "that wild music burdens every bough;" and those "mournful hymns" hush the night to listening sympathy. But in her husband we have a genuine renaissance of the old dramatic power of the English bards. Robert Browning is _so_ dramatic that he forgets himself and his readers too, in his characters and their situations. To study the varieties of men and women is his joy; to reproduce them unalloyed, his triumph. One curious instance of this self-oblivious immersion in the creations of his mind occurs to me. In one of his early poems called "In a Gondola"--as it first appeared--two lovers are happily conversing, until in a moment, we know not why, the tone becomes one of despair, and they bid each other an eternal farewell. Why this change of tone there is no explanation. In a later edition he condescends to inform us, inserting a note to this effect: "He is surprised and stabbed." This is the opposite extreme to Milton's angels carefully explaining to each other that they possess a specific levity which enables them to drop upward. If we think of our own poets whose names are usually connected,--Longfellow and Lowell, for instance,--we shall easily see which is dramatic and which lyric. But the only man of truly dramatic faculty whom we have possessed was one in whom the quality never fully ripened,--I mean Edgar Allan Poe.