ne. 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,
Why she not marvels, strenuously beating
The silent boundless regions of the sky!

He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly,

but forced the earth his couch to make
Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake,

on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.

In _Caliban upon Setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life
is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how
the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast
and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words
which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear
in the few lines I quote:

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
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