Read it through once

The careful student of Browning’s language-shaping must discover-- the requisite susceptibility to vitality of form being supposed-- that his verse is remarkably organic: often, indeed, more organic, even when it appears to be clumsy, than the “faultily faultless” verse of Tennyson. The poet who has written ‘In a Gondola’, ‘By the Fireside’, ‘Meeting at Night’, ‘Parting at Morning’, ‘Gold Hair’, ‘May and Death’, ‘Love among the Ruins’, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, ‘Home Thoughts from the Sea’, the Incantation in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ (some of which are both song and picture), and many, many more that might be named, certainly has the very highest faculty of word and verse music, of music, too, that is entirely new in English Poetry; and it can be shown that he always exercises that faculty WHENEVER THERE’S A REAL ARTISTIC OCCASION FOR IT, not otherwise. Verse-music is never with him a mere literary indulgence. The grotesquerie of rhythm and rhyme which some of his poems exhibit, is as organic as any other feature of his language-shaping, and shows the rarest command of language. He has been charged with having “failed to reach continuous levels of musical phrasing”. It’s a charge which every one who appreciates Browning’s verse in its higher forms (and its higher forms are not those which are addressed especially to the physical ear) will be very ready to admit. In the general tenor of his poetry, he is ABOVE the Singer,-- he is the Seer and Revealer, who sees great truths beyond the bounds of the territory of general knowledge, instead of working over truths within that territory; and no seer of modern times has had his eyes more clearly purged with euphrasy and rue. Poetry is with him, in the language of Mr. E. Paxton Hood (‘Eclectic and Congregational Rev.’, Dec., 1868), “no jingle of words, or pretty amusement for harpsichord or piano, but rather a divine trigonometry, a process of celestial triangulation, a taking observations of celestial places and spheres, an attempt to estimate our world, its place, its life amidst the boundless immeasurable sweeps of space and time; or if describing, then describing the animating stories of the giants, how they fought and fell, or conquered. . .a great all-inclusive strength of song, which is as a battle march to warriors, or as the refreshment of brooks and dates to the spent and toiling soldiers on their way, is more than the pretty idyll, whose sweet and plaintive story pleases the idle hour or idle ear.”