So great a power have these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that I question whether any one could read through the catalogue of a miscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, if realised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears.

And if any of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browning did, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are most truly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphant justification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary and immortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, a piano, an old door.
In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama _The Return of the Druses_, a work which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited in an exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted.

We have in _The Return of the Druses_ his love of the corners of history, his interest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifying sense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verbal luxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must be an Oriental himself.

But, above all, it presents the first rise of that great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth to pursue.

In _Pauline_ and the poems that follow it, Browning has only the comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself.