And Browning's dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments tense with memory and hope.

The insuppressible alertness and enterprise of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments.

He sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive with moving shapes.

To the stricken girl in _Ye Banks and Braes_ memory is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points, the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love; whereas the victim of _The Confessional_ pours forth from her frenzied lips every detail of her tragic story.
So in _The Laboratory_, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of fierce impassioned consciousness:-- "He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here." Both kinds--drama and dramatic lyric--continued to attract him, while neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently throughout the decade.
In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the great drama of history.

To Landor, according to his wife's testimony, Browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to Landor he dedicated the last volume of the _Bells and Pomegranates_.
Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the "inquiring eye" and varied discourse of a second Chaucer.