As a whole, the _Dramatis Personae_ stands yet more clearly apart from _Men and Women_ than that does from all that had gone before.
Both books contain some of his most magnificent work; but the earlier is full of summer light and glow, the later breathes the hectic and poignant splendour of autumn.

The sense of tragic loss broods over all its music.

In lyric strength and beauty there is no decay; but the dramatic imagination has certainly lost somewhat of its flexible strength and easy poise of wing: falling back now upon the personal convictions of the poet, now upon the bald prose of daily life.

_Rabbi ben Ezra_ and _Abt Vogler, A Death in the Desert_, are as noble poetry as _Andrea del Sarto_ or _The Grammarian's Funeral_; but it is a poetry less charged with the "incidents" of any other soul than his own; and, on the other hand, _Dis Aliter Visum_ and _Youth and Art_, and others, effective as they are, yet move in an atmosphere less remote from prose than any of the songs and lays of love which form one of the chief glories of _Men and Women_.

The world which is neither thrillingly beautiful nor grotesquely ugly, but simply poor, unendowed, humdrum, finds for the first time a place in his poetry.