Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!
Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them, like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. This he has done specially in two poems: The Englishman in Italy, where the vast shell of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and truth. The second of these poems is Up at a Villa—Down in the City, where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the delightful character whom he invents to see them. These poems are astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.
Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the filmy insect in the sunshine. I give a few examples. Mortal man could not see a lynx more clearly than Karshish—
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls.
And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question—
Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once
Into the vast and unexplored abyss,
What full-grown power informs her from the first,