She shortens her stride, she chafes at her rider the strange
          and queer: 
      Buheyseh is mad with hope—­beat sister she shall and must,
      Though Duhl, of the hand and heel so clumsy, she has to thank. 
      She is near now, nose by tail—­they are neck by croup—­joy! fear! 
      What folly makes Hoseyn shout ’Dog Duhl, Damned son of the Dust,
      Touch the right ear and press with your foot my Pearl’s left flank!’

      And Duhl was wise at the word, and Muleykeh as prompt perceived
      Who was urging redoubled pace, and to hear him was to obey,
      And a leap indeed gave she, and evanished for evermore. 
      And Hoseyn looked one long last look as who, all bereaved,
      Looks, fain to follow the dead so far as the living may: 
      Then he turned Buheyseh’s neck slow homeward, weeping sore.

      And, lo, in the sunrise, still sat Hoseyn upon the ground
      Weeping:  and neighbours came, the tribesmen of Benu-Asad
      In the vale of green Er-Rass, and they questioned him of his grief;
      And he told them from first to last how, serpent-like, Duhl had wound
      His way to the nest, and how Duhl rode like an ape, so bad! 
      And how Buheyseh did wonders, yet Pearl remained with the thief.

      And they jeered him, one and all:  ’Poor Hoseyn is crazed past hope! 
      How else had he wrought himself his ruin, in fortune’s spite! 
      To have simply held the tongue were a task for a boy or girl,
      And here were Muleykeh again, the eyed like an antelope,
      The child of his heart by day, the wife of his breast by night!’
      ‘And the beaten in speed!’ wept Hoseyn:  ’You never have loved
          my Pearl!’”

There remain Pietro of Abano[56] and Doctor ——.  The latter, a Talmudic legend, is probably the poorest of Browning’s poems:  it is rather farce than humour.  The former is a fine piece of genuine grotesque art, full of pungent humour, acuteness, worldly wisdom, and clever phrasing and rhyming.  It is written in an elaborate comic metre of Browning’s invention, indicated at the end by eight bars of music.  The poem is one of the most characteristic examples of that “Teutonic grotesque, which lies in the expression of deep ideas through fantastic forms,” a grotesque of noble and cultivated art, of which Browning is as great a master in poetry as Carlyle in prose.

The volume ends with a charming lyrical epilogue, not without its personal bearing, though it has sometimes, very unfairly, been represented as a piece of mere self-gratulation.

      “Thus I wrote in London, musing on my betters,”

Browning tells us in some album-verses which have found their way into print, and he naturally complains that what he wrote of Dante should be foisted upon himself.  Indeed, he has quite as much the characteristics of the “spontaneous” as of the “brooding” poet of his parable.