Browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his bold and splendid colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean. Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." His colouring is not subtle; it recalls neither the æthereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing glow and "verdurous glooms" of Keats, nor the choice and cultured splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. He neglects the indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature, or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and "the poppy's red effrontery," with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all by the boldest contrast. Who can doubt that he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that the "Pomegranates" were to be "of blue and of purple and of scarlet," and the "Bells" "of gold"? He loves the daybreak hour of the world's awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping Florence in that "live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze of the Italian mid-day-- "Great noontides, thunderstorms, all glaring pomps That triumph at the heels of June the god." Even a violet-bed he sees as a "flash" of "blue."[65] He loves the play of light on golden hair, and rarely imagines womanhood without it, even in the sombre South and the dusky East; Poiphyria and Lady Carlisle, Evelyn Hope and the maid of Pornic, share the gift with Anael the Druse, with Sordello's Palma, whose "tresses curled Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound About her like a glory! even the ground Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;"