He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye.
By moonlight.
That is enough to prove his power. And the animals are seen, not as a cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-transmuting power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban. Then again, in that lovely lyric in Paracelsus,
Thus the Mayne glideth,
the banks and waves are full of all the bird and beast life of a river. Elsewhere, he sees the falcon spread his wings like a banner, the stork clapping his bill in the marsh, the coot dipping his blue breast in the water, the swallow flying to Venice—"that stout sea-farer"—the lark shivering for joy, and a hundred other birds; and lastly, even the great bird of the Imagination, the Phoenix, flying home; and in a splendid verse records the sight:
As the King-bird with ages on his plumes
Travels to die in his ancestral glooms.
Not less wonderful, and more unique in English poetry, is his painting of insects. He describes the hermit-bee, the soft, small, unfrighted thing, lighting on the dead vine-leaf, and twirling and filing all day. He strikes out the grasshopper at a touch—
Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.
He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood: