In his next following collection, under the similar descriptive
title of "Dramatis Personae," he added to this class of work,
shaping in the mould of blank verse mainly used for "Men and Women"
his personifications of the Medium Mr. Sludge, the embryo theologian
Caliban, the ripened mystical saint of "A Death in the Desert";
while Abt Vogler, the creative musician, Rabbi ben Ezra, the
intuitional philosopher, and the chastened adept in loving, James
Lee's wife, although held within the embrace of their maker's
dramatic conception of them, as persons of his stage, were made to
pour out their speech in rhyme as Johannes Agricola in the earlier
volume uttered his creed and Rudel his love-message, as if the heat
of their emotion-moved personality required such an outlet. Some
such general notion as this of the scope of this volume, and of the
design of the poet in the construction, classification, and orderly
arrangement of so much of his briefer work as is here contained
seems to be borne out upon a closer examination. On the threshold
of this new poetic world of personality stands the Poet of the poem
significantly called "Transcendentalism," who is speaking to another
poet about the too easily obvious, metaphor-bare philosophy of his
opus in twelve books.
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