Like the bright side of a sorrow, and the banks
Had violets opening from sleep like eyes.

That is fairly good; he describes what he has seen; but it might have
been better. We know what he means, but his words do not accurately or
imaginatively convey this meaning. The best lines are the first three,
but the peculiar note of Shelley sighs so fully in them that they do not
represent Browning. What is special in them is his peculiar delight not
only in the morning which here he celebrates, but in the spring. It was
in his nature, even in old age, to love with passion the beginnings of
things; dawn, morning, spring and youth, and their quick blood; their
changes, impulses, their unpremeditated rush into fresh experiment.
Unlike Tennyson, who was old when he was old, Browning was young when he
was old. Only once in _Asolando_, in one poem, can we trace that he felt
winter in his heart. And the lines in _Pauline_ which I now quote,
spoken by a young man who had dramatised himself into momentary age, are
no ill description of his temper at times when he was really old:

As life wanes, all its care and strife and toil
Seem strangely valueless, while the old trees
Which grew by our youth's home, the waving mass
Of climbing plants heavy with bloom and dew,
The morning swallows with their songs like words.
All these seem clear and only worth our thoughts:
So, aught connected with my early life,
My rude songs or my wild imaginings,
How I look on them--most distinct amid
The fever and the stir of after years!

The next description in _Pauline_ is that in which he describes--to
illustrate what Shelley was to him--the woodland spring which became a
mighty river. Shelley, as first conceived by Browning, seemed to him
like a sacred spring:

Scarce worth a moth's flitting, which long grasses cross,
And one small tree embowers droopingly--
Joying to see some wandering insect won
To live in its few rushes, or some locust
To pasture on its boughs, or some wild bird
Stoop for its freshness from the trackless air.

A piece of careful detail, close to nature, but not close enough;
needing to be more detailed or less detailed, but the first instance in
his work of his deliberate use of Nature, not for love of herself only,
(Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron would have described the spring in the
woods for its own sake), but for illustration of humanity. It is
Shelley-