It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were.
_The Ring and the Book_, for example, is an illuminating departure in literary method--the method of telling the same story several times and trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into several different and equally interesting stories.

_Pippa Passes_, to take another example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detached dramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolated figure.

The invention of these things is not merely like the writing of a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet or the Gothic arch.

The poet who makes them does not merely create himself--he creates other poets.

It is so in a degree long past enumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems.