6 of the _Bells_, but had for the present no prospect of the stage.

Nine years later, however, the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at Sadler's Wells.
The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact.

Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing _Colombe's Birthday_.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business.

_A Soul's Tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino.

Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the _Wild Duck_.