This was borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a comfortable reaction from it has arisen.

In poetry it did not last so long.

Morris carried us out of it.

But long before it began, long before its entrance into the arts, Browning, who on another side of his genius delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual analysis of human nature.

When he began it, no one cared for it; and _Paracelsus, Sordello_ and the soul-dissecting poems in _Bells and Pomegranates_ fell on an unheeding world.