Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretence
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!"

A poem of quite another order of art, a life-like sketch rather than a
creation, is found in _Waring_. The original of Waring was one of
Browning's friends, Alfred Domett, the author of _Ranolf and Amohia_,
then or afterwards Prime Minister in New Zealand.[18] The poem is
written in a free and familiar style, which rises from time to time into
a kind of precipitate brilliance; it is more personal in detail than
Browning often allows himself to be; and its humour is blithe and
friendly. In another poem, now known as _Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister_, the humour is grotesque, bitter and pungent, the humour of
hate. The snarling monk of the Spanish cloister pours out on poor,
innocent, unsuspecting "Brother Lawrence" a wealth of really choice and
masterly vituperation, not to be matched out of Shakespeare. The poem is
a clever study of that mood of active disgust which most of us have felt
toward some possibly inoffensive enough person, whose every word, look
or action jars on the nerves. It flashes, too, a brilliant comic light
on the natural tendencies of asceticism. Side by side with this poem,
under the general name of _Camp and Cloister_, was published the
vigorous and touching little ballad now known as _Incident of the French
Camp_, a stirring lyric of war, such as Browning has always been able,
rarely as he has cared, to write. The ringing _Cavalier Tunes_ (so
graphically set to music by Sir C. Villiers Stanford) strike the same
note; so, too, does the wonderfully clever little riding poem, _Through
the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr_, a _tour de force_ strung together on a
single rhyme: "As I ride, as I ride."

_Count Gismond