More than one significant hint may be gleaned from his verse in regard to his opinion upon the formal side of the poet's art. In "Transcendentalism" he has his fling at the didactic poet who pleases to speak naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds, for "song" is the art of the poet. Some stout mage like him of Halberstadt has his admiration, who with a
"'Look you!' vents a brace of rhymes, And in there breaks the sudden rose herself, Over us, under, round us every side, Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all,-- Buries us with a glory young once more, Pouring heaven into this shut house of life."
He was equally averse to an ornate classical embellishment of a latter day subject or to a looking at nature through mythopoeic Greek eyes. This is driven home in the splendid fooling in "Gerard de Lairesse" where the poet himself indulges by way of a joke in some high-flown classical imagery in derision of the style of Lairesse and hints covertly probably at the nineteenth-century masters of classical resuscitation, in subject matter and allusion, Swinburne and Morris. Reacting to soberer mood, he reiterates his belief in the utter deadness of Greek ideals of art, speaking with a strength of conviction so profound as to make one feel that here at least Browning suffered from a decided limitation, all the more strange, too, when one considers his own masterly treatment of Greek subjects. To the poets whose poetic creed is
"Dream afresh old godlike shapes, Recapture ancient fable that escapes, Push back reality, repeople earth With vanished falseness, recognize no worth In fact new-born unless 'tis rendered back Pallid by fancy, as the western rack Of fading cloud bequeaths the lake some gleam Of its gone glory!"
"Let things be--not seem, I counsel rather,--do, and nowise dream! Earth's young significance is all to learn; The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urn Where who seeks fire finds ashes. Ghost, forsooth! What was the best Greece babbled of as truth? A shade, a wretched nothing,--sad, thin, drear,
Sad school Was Hades! Gladly,--might the dead but slink To life back,--to the dregs once more would drink Each interloper, drain the humblest cup Fate mixes for humanity."