The poem is a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are "closets to search and alcoves to importune,"-- "The day wears, And door succeeds door, We try the fresh fortune, Range the wide house from the wing to the centre." For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct analysis in _Sordello_, he chose to make his men and women the instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of his delight in the dramatic monologue.

He approached all problematic character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed, if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into integument and core.

Not that Browning always displays the core; on the contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask.

"For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke." Browning is less concerned to "save" the subjects of his so-called "Special Pleadings" than to imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves.

But the optimist in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram's-- "Just when we're safest comes a sunset touch." Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the obstacles it overcame.