Soars up and up, shivering for very joy;
Afar the ocean sleeps; white fishing gulls
Flit where the strand is purple with its tribe
Of nested limpets; savage creatures seek
Their loves in wood and plain--and God renews
His ancient rapture."

In these lines, particularly in their close, is manifest the influence
of the noble Hebraic poetry. It must have been at this period that
Browning conned over and over with an exultant delight the simple but
lordly diction of Isaiah and the other prophets, preferring this
Biblical poetry to that even of his beloved Greeks. There is an anecdote
of his walking across a public park (I am told Richmond, but more
probably it was Wimbledon Common) with his hat in his left hand and his
right waving to and fro declamatorily, while the wind blew his hair
around his head like a nimbus: so rapt in his ecstasy over the solemn
sweep of the Biblical music that he did not observe a small following
consisting of several eager children, expectant of thrilling
stump-oratory. He was just the man, however, to accept an anti-climax
genially, and to dismiss his disappointed auditory with something more
tangible than an address.

The poet-precursor of scientific knowledge is again and again manifest:
as, for example, in

"Hints and previsions of which faculties
Are strewn confusedly everywhere about
The inferior natures, and all lead up higher,
All shape out dimly the superior race,
The heir of hopes too fair to turn out false,