The second narrative poem of this period, _The Inn Album_ (1875), is in truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative frame-work. It is as concentrated as _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is diffuse; and the unities of time and place assist the tragic concentration. A recast of _The Inn Album_ might indeed have appeared as a drama on the Elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as "A Yorkshire Tragedy"; it moves with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe. The incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous chronicle of English nineteenth century society.[116] Browning's tale of crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of Elizabethan drama the story of a "penny dreadful." He was right; but he should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces of our dramatic literature have had sources of no greater dignity. The story of the "penny dreadful" is here rehandled and becomes a tragedy of which the material part is only a translation into external deed of a tragedy of the soul. The _dramatis personae_, as refashioned from the crude fact and the central passions of the poem, were such as would naturally call forth what was characteristic in Browning's genius. A martyr of love, a traitor to love, an avenger of love,--these are the central figures. The girlish innocence of the cousin is needed only as a ray of morning sunlight to relieve the eye that is strained and pained by the darkness and the pallor of the faces of the exponents of passion. And a like effect is produced by the glimpses of landscape, rich in the English qualities of cultured gladness and repose, which Browning so seldom presented, but which are perfectly rendered here: The wooded watered country, hill and dale And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift O' the sun-touched dew. We must feel that life goes on with leisurely happiness outside the little room that isolates its tragic occupants; the smoke from fires of turf and wood is in the air; cottagers are at their morning cookery. After all the poet of the inn album was well inspired in his eloquent address:--"Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!" and only certain incidents, which time will soon efface, have touched the salutation with irony.