And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in
savage words. He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and
explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both poets found their
good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid
simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in a famous
chapter of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_[102] laid down a fourfold
distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the
hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and
roughness,--to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and
the "sleek." All four kinds had their function in the versatile
technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while
Tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of
the "sleek," Browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the
"tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the
counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric
loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but

"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee,"

though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like

"Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

[Footnote 102: _De Vulg. Eloq._, ii. 8.]

[Footnote 103: Making allowance, of course, for the more "shaggy" and
"tousled" character of the English vocabulary as a whole, compared with
Italian.]