The curious technicalities of the chemist's workshop, taken for granted in _Paracelsus_, are now painted with a realism reminiscent of Romeo's Apothecary and _The Alchemist_.

And the outward drama of intrigue, completely effaced in _Paracelsus_ by the inward drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and laughter in the background, the more sinister because it is not seen.

These lyrics and romances are "dramatic" not only in the sense that the speakers express, as Browning insisted, other minds and sentiments than his own, but in the more legitimate sense that they are plucked as it were out of the living organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their self-revelation.
A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama proper his free, full, and natural expression.

This was not altogether the case with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays.

The drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest.