Italy is no longer the background of the human figures.

There is perhaps less opulence of colour; less of the manifold "joys of living." If higher points in the life of the spirit are not touched, the religious feeling has more of inwardness and is more detached from external historical fact than it had ever been before; there is more sense of resistance to and victory over whatever may seem adverse to the life of the soul.

In the poems which deal with love the situations and postures of the spirit are less simple and are sometimes even strained; the fantastic and the grotesque occupy a smaller place; a plain dignity, a grave solemnity of style is attained in passages of _A Death in the Desert_, which had hardly been reached before.

Yet substantially the volume is a continuation of the poems of 1855; except in one instance, where Tennyson's method in _Maud_, that of a sequence of lyrics, is adopted, the methods are the same; the predominating themes of _Men and Women_, love, art, religion, are the predominating themes of _Dramatis Personae._ A slight metrical complication--the internal rhyme in the second line of each stanza of _Dis aliter visum_ and in the third line of the quatrains of _May and Death_--may be noted as indicating Browning's love of new metrical experiments.

In the former of these poems the experiment cannot be called a success; the clash of sounds, "a mass of brass," "walked and talked," and the like, seems too much as if an accident had been converted into a rule.
_Mr Sludge, "the Medium_" the longest piece in the volume, has been already noticed.