But Browning did not heed the unheeding of the world.

He had the courage of his aims in art, and while he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern of the inner life of men.

And then, when the tendency of which I speak had collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous amazement, found him out.

"Here is a man," it said, "who has been doing in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety.

We will read him now." So Browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having reached him, he became a favoured poet.
However, fond as he was of metaphysical analysis, he did not fall into the extremes into which other writers carried it, _Paracelsus_ is, indeed, entirely concerned with the inner history of a soul, but _Sordello_ combines with a similar history a tale of political and warlike action in which men and women, like Salinguerra and Palma, who live in outward work rather than in inward thought, are described; while in poems like _Pippa Passes_ and some of the Dramas, emotion and thought, intimately interwoven, are seen blazing, as it were, into a lightning of swift deeds.