and Rabbi Ben Ezra is much more than this. The poetic measure, the stave or stanza, has a soul in it, a movement which is not only the utterance of life but the poetic life itself. It is not (except in mechanical work like some of the old Pindarics) a mere shape given to words and sentences. As it comes to the poet, before the poem is made, it is part of his inspiration, an unbodied melody with the life of the poem in it.
When Mr. Saintsbury's third volume appears, the art of Browning's verse will be better understood. It is not the same, but it is of the same kind as the art of Tennyson.
Browning's blank verse in its ordinary fashion is truly represented in Calverley's burlesque. The trick of it may be found—a sort of prophetic parody—in Elvira, or the worst not always true, a drama by a Person of Quality (the Earl of Bristol) in 1667:
Prythee, if thou lov'st me
Hold me no longer in suspense, Chichon.
Chi.Why then, for fear—the devil a bit for love—
I'll tell you, sir, that luckily I met
The drab Francisca at the Capuchin's,
Lodging behind her lady, I think on purpose;
For I perceived her eager sparrow-hawk's eye,
With her veil down (ne'er stirs a twinkling-while
From its sly peeping-hole), had found me straight.
I took my time i' the nick, but she outnicked me.
Both Browning and Tennyson are fond of licence and variations and resolution of feet in their blank verse. But Browning, like Tennyson, will have none of these variations in his most solemn passages:
O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire!
Nor is there any such licence admitted when he is thinking of pure beauty the Greek islands and their sweetness and light:
Cleon, the poet from the sprinkled isles,
Lily on lily that o'erlace the sea—
