Singing helped the verses best,
And when singing's best was done,
To my lute I left the rest.

So wore night; the East was gray,
White the broad-faced hemlock flowers;
There would be another day;
Ere its first of heavy hours
Found me, I had passed away."

This tells enough to be an entire poem. It is not a description of
the night and the lover: we are made to see them. The lines I have
italicised are of the school of Dante or of Rembrandt. Their vividness
overwhelms. In the latest poems, as in _Ivan Ivanovitch_ or _Ned
Bratts_, we find the same swift sureness of touch. It is only natural
that most of Browning's finest landscapes are Italian.[11]

As a humorist in poetry, Browning takes rank with our greatest. His
humour, like most of his qualities, is peculiar to himself, though no
doubt Carlyle had something of it. It is of wide capacity, and ranges
from the effervescence of pure fun and freak to that salt and briny
laughter whose taste is bitterer than tears. Its full extent will be
seen by comparing _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_ with _Confessions_, or in
the contrast of the two parts of _Holy-Cross Day_. We find the simplest
form of humour, the jolly laughter of an unaffected nature, the
effervescence of a sparkling and overflowing brain, in such poems as _Up
at a Villa--Down in the City_, or _Pacchiarotto_, or _Sibrandus
Schafnaburgensis_. _Fra Lippo Lippi_ leans to this category, though it
is infused with biting wit and stinging irony; for it is first and
foremost the bubbling-up of a restless and irrepressibly comic nature,
the born Bohemian compressed but not contained by the rough rope-girdle
of the monk. He is Browning's finest figure of comedy. _Ned Bratts_ is
another admirable creation of true humour, tinged with the grotesque. In
_A Lovers' Quarrel_ and _Dis aliter Visum_, humour refines into passion.
In _Bishop Blougram_ it condenses into wit. The poem has a well-bred
irony; in _A Soul's Tragedy_ irony smiles and stings; in _Mr. Sludge,
the Medium_, it stabs with a thirsty point. In _Caliban upon Setebos_ we
have the pure grotesque, an essentially noble variety of art, admitting
of the utmost refinement of workmanship. The _Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister_ attains a new effect of grotesque: it is the comic tragedy of
vituperative malevolence. _Holy-Cross Day_ heightens the grotesque with
pity, indignation and solemnity: _The Heretic's Tragedy_ raises it