He with a “look you!” vents a brace of rhymes,
    And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,
    Over us, under, round us every side,
    Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs
    And musty volumes, Boehme’s book and all—­
    Buries us with a glory, young once more,
    Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.

One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is the splendid aestheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and pedestrian details with beauty.

The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a great painter as well as a, great humorist and realist, we shall have read him in vain.  No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, as when the mourners are made to say in A Grammarian’s Funeral:—­

    Look out if yonder be not day again. 
    Rimming the rock-row!

Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners had stubbed his foot against a sharp stone on the mountain-path.  And yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own far common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion.  There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river.  His poems have the movement of living things.  They are lacking only in smooth and static loveliness.  They are full of the hoof-beats of Pegasus.

We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an exalted acceptance of it.  Browning is one of the very few poets who, echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good.  His sense of the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half of his poems. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is a fable of life triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile thing—­a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish hands.  Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning’s genius, one has only to read Childe Roland again to restore one’s faith.  There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower.  As detail is added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress of all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of apprehension and the Tower itself appears:—­

    The round squat tower, blind as the fool’s heart.

Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the verses that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:—­

    Not see? because of night perhaps?—­why, day
      Came back again for that! before it left,
    The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: 
      The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
    Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay—­
      “Now stab and end the creature—­to the heft!”