And sang a kindred soul out to his face,—
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reach’d thee amid thy chambers, blanch’d their blue,
And bared them of the glory—to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die,—
Not considering the content matter, but looking alone at the way of writing, there is a clear resemblance between this celebrated passage from Browning and any characteristic example of Tennyson’s maturer manner. Tennyson might have hesitated at “red-ripe of the heart,” and have avoided the repetition of “blue” at the end of a line, but otherwise there is nothing either beyond or below his reach in Browning’s full-bodied and admirably balanced blank verse. Nor was Browning incapable of the richly-vestured lyric movement of which Tennyson was a master—as this from Paracelsus may show—
And strew faint sweetness from some old
Egyptian’s fine worm-eaten shroud
Which breaks to dust when once unroll’d;