Robert Browning

achment, and shows a cool
and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as
well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently
share his own. An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to
courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open
contempt. His ends are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite
capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but he regards
ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of Hamlet. By birth and
principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of Browning's men
of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker. He
"watches his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and
exposes them with ironical candour. Few of Browning's less right-minded
persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than
Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:--

"All is for the best.
Too costly a flower were this, I see it now,
To pluck and set upon my barren helm
To wither,--any garish plume will do."

_Colombe's Birthday_ was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the _Bells_, but
had for the present no prospect of the stage. Nine years later, however,
the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its
predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at
Sadler's Wells.

The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the
hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom
and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic
sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after
finishing _Colombe's Birthday_.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of
poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. _A
Soul's Tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane
policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of Ogniben over the
sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have

Reverend Nehemiah Adams (born February 19, 1806; died October 6, 1878) was an American clergyman and writer. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1806 to Nehemiah Adams and Mehitabel Torrey Adams. He graduated from Harvard University in 1826, and from Andover Theological Seminary in 1829. He was ordained as co-pastor of First Congregational Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that same year. In 1832, he married Martha Hooper.

Joanna Baillie (September 11, 1762February 23, 1851) was a Scottish poet and dramatist. Baillie was very well-known during her lifetime and, though a woman, intended her plays not for the closet but for the stage. Admired both for her literary powers and her sweetness of disposition, her cottage at Hampstead was the centre of a brilliant literary society. Baillie died at the age of 88, her faculties remaining unimpaired to the last.

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