However, when, moved by the nobleness of Luria, she gives up her revenge on Florence, she speaks well, and her outburst is poetical.

Puccio is a real personage, but a poor fellow.
Tiburzio is a pale reflection of Luria.

Husain alone has some personality, but even his Easternness, which isolates him, is merged in his love of Luria.

All of them only exist to be the scaffolding by means of which Luria's character is built into magnificence, and they disappear from our sight, like scaffolding, when the building is finished.
There are fine things in the poem: the image of Florence; its men, its streets, its life as seen by the stranger-eyes of Luria; the contrast between the Eastern and the Latin nature; the picture of hot war; the sudden friendship of Luria and Tiburzio, the recognition in a moment of two high hearts by one another; the picture of Tiburzio fighting at the ford, of Luria tearing the letter among the shamed conspirators; the drawing of the rough honest soldier-nature in Puccio, and, chief of all, the vivid historic painting of the time and the type of Italian character at the time of the republics.
* * * * * The first part of _A Soul's Tragedy_ is written in poetry and the second in prose.

The first part is dull but the second is very lively and amusing; so gay and clever that we begin to wish that a good deal of Browning's dramas had been written in prose.