These might be called treatises, and are apart from the kind of poem of which I speak.

They begin, indeed, within its limits, but they soon transgress those limits; and are more properly classed with poems which, also representative, have not the brevity, the scenery, the lucidity, the objective representation, the concentration of the age into one man's mind, which mark out these poems from the rest, and isolate them into a class of their own.
The voice we hear in them is rarely the voice of Browning; nor is the mind of their personages his mind, save so far as he is their creator.
There are a few exceptions to this, but, on the whole, Browning has, in writing these poems, stripped himself of his own personality.

He had, by creative power, made these men; cast them off from himself, and put them into their own age.

They talk their minds out in character with their age.

Browning seems to watch them, and to wonder how they got out of his hands and became men.