closer examination.  On the threshold of this new poetic world of personality stands the Poet of the poem significantly called “Transcendentalism,” who is speaking to another poet about the too easily obvious, metaphor-bare philosophy of his opus in twelve books.  That the admonishing poet is stationed there at the very door-sill of the Gallery of Men and Women is surely not accidental, even if Browning’s habit of plotting his groups of poems symmetrically by opening with a prologue-poem sounding the right key, and rounding the theme with an epilogue, did not tend to prove it intentional.  It is an open secret that the last poem in “Men and Women,” for instance, is an epilogue of autobiographical interest, gathering up the foregoing strains of his lyre, for a few last chords, in so intimate a way that the actual fall of the fingers may be felt, the pausing smile seen, as the performer turns towards the one who inspired “One Word More.”  The appropriateness of “Transcendentalism” as a prologue need be no more of a secret than that of “One Word More” as an epilogue, although it is left to betray itself.  Other poets writing on the poet, Emerson for example, and Tennyson, place the outright plain name of their thought at the head of their verses, without any attempt to make their titles dress their parts and keep as thoroughly true to their roles as the poems themselves.  But a complete impersonation of his thought in name and style as well as matter is characteristic of Browning, and his personified poets playing their parts together in “Transcendentalism” combine to exhibit a little masque exemplifying their writer’s view of the Poet as veritably as if he had named it specifically “The Poet.”  One poet shows the other, and brings him visibly forward; but even in such a morsel of dramatic workmanship as this, fifty-one lines all told, there is the complexity and involution of life itself, and, as ever in Browning’s monologues, over the shoulder of the poet more obviously portrayed peers as livingly the face of the poet portraying him.  And this one—­the admonishing poet—­is set there with his “sudden rose,” as if to indicate with that symbol of poetic magic what kind of spell was sought to be exercised by their maker to conjure up in his house of song the figures that people its niches.  Could a poem be imagined more cunningly devised to reveal a typical poetic personality, and a typical theory of poetic method, through its way of revealing another?  What poet could have composed it but one who himself employed the dramatic method of causing the abstract to be realizable through the concrete image of it, instead of the contrary mode of seeking to divest the objective of its concrete form in order to lay bare its abstract essence?  This opposite theory of the poetic function is precisely the Boehme mode, against which the veiled dramatic poet, who is speaking in favor of the Halberstadtian magic, admonishes his brother, while he himself in practical substantiation of his theory of poetics brings bodily in sight the boy-face above the winged harp, vivified and beautiful himself, although his poem is but a shapeless mist.