This eve's the time, This eve intense with yon first trembling star We seem to pant and reach; scarce aught between The earth that rises and the heaven that bends; All nature self-abandoned, every tree Flung as it will, pursuing its own thoughts And fixed so, every flower and every weed, No pride, no shame, no victory, no defeat; All under God, each measured by itself. These statues round us stand abrupt, distinct, The strong in strength, the weak in weakness fixed, The Muse forever wedded to her lyre, Nymph to her fawn, and Silence to her rose: See God's approval on his universe! Let us do so--aspire to live as these In harmony with truth, ourselves being true! Take the first way, and let the second come! (BROWNING: _In a Balcony_. 1855.) The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think? So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too-- So, through the thunder comes a human voice Saying, "O heart I made, a heart beats here! Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself! Thou hast no power nor may'st conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love me who have died for thee." The madman saith He said so: it is strange. (BROWNING: _Epistle of Karshish_. 1855.) God's works--paint any one, and count it crime To let a truth slip. Don't object, "His works Are here already; nature is complete: Suppose you reproduce her--(which you can't) There's no advantage! you must beat her, then." For, don't you mark? we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted--better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out. (BROWNING: _Fra Lippo Lippi_. 1855.) Of some of Browning's blank verse Mr. Mayor observes: "The extreme harshness of many of these lines is almost a match for anything in Surrey, only what in Surrey is helplessness seems the perversity of strength in Browning.... The Aristophanic vein in Browning is continually leading him to trample under foot the dignity of verse and to shock the uninitiated reader by colloquial familiarities, 'thumps upon the back,' such as the poet Cowper resented; yet no one can be more impressive than he is when he surrenders himself to the pure spirit of poetry, and flows onward in a stream of glorious music, such as that in which Balaustion pictures Athens overwhelmed by an advance of the sea (_Aristophanes' Apology_, p. 2)." (_Chapters on English Metre_, 2d ed., pp. 216, 217.)