The monologue of _Pauline_ had been succeeded by what may be called the conversational drama of _Paracelsus_, and that by the dramatic _Strafford_. The form now experimented with was to be the dominant one for the next ten years, though his next attempt was in form almost a reversion to _Pauline_. During the remainder of 1837 and until Easter, 1838, Browning was engaged on _Sordello_, but interrupted this poem for a couple of years which have a special interest as the years when he first visited Italy, and when he entered upon an order of production which was to be very significant of his poetic choice of subject and treatment. Browning himself recognized the importance to him of his acquaintance with Italy. "It was my university," he was wont to say, when asked if he had been a student at Oxford or Cambridge. The companion poems, _The Englishman in Italy_ and _The Italian in England_, illustrate that double nationality in Browning's mind by which the two countries were, so to speak, married for him. The latter of these two poems was one which Mazzini used to read to his countrymen when he would demonstrate how generously an Englishman could enter into the Italian's patriotic aspirations. The journey was a rapid one. "I went," Browning says, "to Trieste, then Venice--then through Treviso and Bassano to the mountains, delicious Asolo, all my places and castles, you will see. Then to Vicenza, Padua, and Venice again. Then to Verona, Trent, Innspruck, Munich, Salzburg in Franconia, Frankfort and Mayence; down the Rhine to Cologne, then to Aix-la-Chapelle, Siège and Antwerp; then home." It would seem as if he had begun _Sordello_ with a bookish knowledge only of Italy, and later charged it with a more informing spirit of love for that country and embroidered it with descriptive scenes drawn from his personal observation. The poem was published in 1840, but the result of the journey in Italy and of the poet's more complete finding of himself--a process by the bye which may almost be taken as having its analogue in _Sordello_--were made most evident by the next publication, the story of which is told in the Introduction to _Pippa Passes_. The very form chosen for _Bells and Pomegranates_ was a challenge to the public not so fantastically arrogant as Horne's famous publication of _Orion_ at a farthing, but noticeable as an earnest of Browning's appeal to his generation and not to a select circle of admiring friends. In this series of writings, extending from 1841 through 1846, Browning struck the note again and again, in drama, lyric, and romance, which was to be the dominant note of his poetry, that disclosure of the soul of man in all manner of circumstances, as if the world were to the poet a great laboratory of souls, and he was forever to be engaged in solving, dissolving, and resolving the elements.