I can understand the hunger and thirst which beset great poets, who had, like these two men, succeeded in so many different kinds of poetry, to succeed also in the serious drama, written in poetry.

It is a legitimate ambition; but poets should be acquainted with their limitations, and not waste their energies or our patience on work which they cannot do well.

That men like Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the master-tragedians of Greece have done; who knew their Shakespeare, to say nothing of the other Elizabethan dramatists; who had seen Moliere on the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed, and versed; that they, having written a play like _Harold_ or _Strafford_, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it on the stage should go on writing more dramas, would seem incomprehensible, were it not that power to do one thing very well is so curiously liable to self-deceit.
The writing of the first drama is not to be blamed.

It would be unnatural not to try one's hand.

It is the writing of the others which is amazing in men like Tennyson and Browning.