under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it imposed.  Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which directly “imitates action,” than by the dramatic speech or monologue, which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind.  And Browning’s dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments tense with memory and hope.  The insuppressible alertness and enterprise of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments.  He sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive with moving shapes.  To the stricken girl in Ye Banks and Braes memory is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points, the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love; whereas the victim of The Confessional pours forth from her frenzied lips every detail of her tragic story.

So in The Laboratory, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of fierce impassioned consciousness:—­

     “He is with her, and they know that I know
      Where they are, what they do:  they believe my tears flow
      While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
      Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—­I am here.”

Both kinds—­drama and dramatic lyric—­continued to attract him, while neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently throughout the decade.

In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning’s monologues have no nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the great drama of history.  To Landor, according to his wife’s testimony, Browning “always said that he owed more than to any contemporary”; to Landor he dedicated the last volume of the Bells and Pomegranates.  Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the “inquiring eye” and varied discourse of a second Chaucer.  It is hardly rash to connect with his admiration for the elder artist Browning’s predilection for these brief revealing glimpses into the past.  Browning cared less for the actual personnel of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more spontaneous and naive, anti-feudal temper.  The French camp and the Spanish cloister, Gismond and My Last Duchess (originally called France and Italy), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages, and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant imagination and pronounced antipathies.