But while Browning's energetic temperament habitually impelled him to represent character in action, his imaginative strength did not lie in the region of action at all, but in the region of thought; the kinds of expression of which he had boundless command were rather those which analyse character than those which exhibit it.

The two impulses derived from temperament and from imagination thus drew him in somewhat diverse directions; and for some years the joy in the stir and stress and many-sided life of drama competed with the powerful bent of the portrayer of souls, until the two contending currents finally coalesced in the dramatic monologues of _Men and Women_.

In 1835 the solution was not yet found, but the five years which followed were to carry Browning, not without crises of perplexity and hesitation, far on his way towards it.

_Paracelsus_ was no sooner completed than he entered upon his kindred but more esoteric portrayal of the soul-history of Sordello,--a study in which, with the dramatic form, almost all the dramatic excellences of its predecessors are put aside.

But the poet was outgrowing the method; the work hung fire; and we find him, before he had gone far with the perplexed record of that "ineffectual angel," already "eager to freshen a jaded mind by diverting it to the healthy natures of a grand epoch."[6] [Footnote 6: Preface to the first edition of _Strafford_ (subsequently omitted).] The open-eyed man of the world and of affairs in Browning was plainly clamouring for more expression than he had yet found.