There, in five lines, is the scene and the mood, and in the sixth line Porphyria may enter.  Take a middle-period poem, A Serenade at the Villa, for an instance of more deliberate description, flashed by the same fiery art:—­

      “That was I, you heard last night
        When there rose no moon at all,
      Nor, to pierce the strained and tight
        Tent of heaven, a planet small: 
      Life was dead and so was light.

      Not a twinkle from the fly,
        Not a glimmer from the worm. 
      When the crickets stopped their cry,
        When the owls forebore a term,
      You heard music; that was I.

      Earth turned in her sleep with pain,
        Sultrily suspired for proof: 
      In at heaven and out again,
        Lightning!—­where it broke the roof,
      Bloodlike, some few drops of rain.

      What they could my words expressed,
        O my love, my all, my one! 
      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.