In the exercise of his power of placing a character or incident in a
sympathetic setting, Browning shows himself, as I have pointed out,
singularly skilful. He never avails himself of the dramatic poet's
licence of vagueness as to surroundings: he sees them himself with
instant and intense clearness, and stamps them as clearly on our brain.
The picture calls up the mood. Here is the opening of one of his very
earliest poems, _Porphyria's Lover_:--

"The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake,
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria."

There, in five lines, is the scene and the mood, and in the sixth line
Porphyria may enter. Take a middle-period poem, _A Serenade at the
Villa_, for an instance of more deliberate description, flashed by the
same fiery art:--

"That was I, you heard last night
When there rose no moon at all,
Nor, to pierce the strained and tight
Tent of heaven, a planet small:
Life was dead and so was light.

Not a twinkle from the fly,
Not a glimmer from the worm.
When the crickets stopped their cry,