O lyric love, half-angel and half-bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,-- Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue, And sang a kindred soul out to his face,-- Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart-- When the first summons from the darkling earth Reach’d thee amid thy chambers, blanch’d their blue, And bared them of the glory--to drop down, To toil for man, to suffer or to die,-- Not considering the content matter, but looking alone at the way of writing, there is a clear resemblance between this celebrated passage from Browning and any characteristic example of Tennyson’s maturer manner. Tennyson might have hesitated at “red-ripe of the heart,” and have avoided the repetition of “blue” at the end of a line, but otherwise there is nothing either beyond or below his reach in Browning’s full-bodied and admirably balanced blank verse. Nor was Browning incapable of the richly-vestured lyric movement of which Tennyson was a master--as this from _Paracelsus_ may show-- And strew faint sweetness from some old Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud Which breaks to dust when once unroll’d; Or shredded perfume, like a cloud From closet long to quiet vow’d, With moth’d and dropping arras hung, Mouldering her lute and books among, As when a queen, long dead, was young. And then we pass from these, done so to speak by a master in the best manner of his age, to-- I want to know a butcher paints, A baker rhymes for his pursuit, Candlestick-maker much acquaints His soul with song, or, haply mute, Blows out his brains upon the flute....