At the same time he seldom could resist the temptation to put in another thought, another simile, another illustration, although the poem might be already quite full. He called out, like the conductor of a street-car, “Move up in front: room for one more!” He had little tautology of expression, but much of conception. A good critic says “Browning condenses by the phrase, elaborates by the volume.”[15] One consequence of this system of writing is that a great deal of Browning’s poetry lends itself admirably to translation,—into English. The number of prose paraphrases of his poems is great, and so constantly increasing that it seems as if there must be a real demand for them. But Coleridge, speaking of the qualities of a true poetic style, remarked: “Whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or in association, or in any other feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.” Another very notable thing in Browning’s poetry is his fertility and fluency of rhyme. He is probably the most rapid, ingenious, and unwearying rhymer among the English poets. There is a story that once, in company with Tennyson, he was challenged to produce a rhyme for “rhinoceros,” and almost instantly accomplished the task with a verse in which the unwieldy quadruped kept time and tune with the phrase “he can toss Eros.”[16] There are other _tours de force_ almost as extraordinary in his serious poems. Who but Browning would have thought of rhyming “syntax” with “tin-tacks,” or “spare-rib” with “Carib,” (_Flight of Duchess_) or “Fra Angelico’s” with “bellicose,” or “Ghirlandajo” with “heigh-ho,” (_Old Pictures in Florence_) or “expansive explosive” with “O Danaides, O Sieve!” (_Master Hugues_). Rhyme, with most poets, acts as a restraint, a brake upon speech. But with Browning it is the other way. His rhymes are like wild, frolicsome horses, leaping over the fences and carrying him into the widest digressions. Many a couplet, many a stanza would not have been written but for the impulse of a daring, suggestive rhyme. Join to this love of somewhat reckless rhyming, his deep and powerful sense of humour, and you have the secret of his fondness for the grotesque. His poetry abounds in strange contrasts, sudden changes of mood, incongruous comparisons, and odd presentations of well-known subjects. Sometimes the whole poem is written in this manner. The _Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister_, _Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_, and _Caliban upon Setebos_, are poetic gargoyles. Sometimes he begins seriously enough, as in the poem on Keats, and closes with a bit of fantastic irony: “Hobbs hints blue,—straight he turtle eats: Nobbs prints blue,—claret crowns his cup: Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats— Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats?”