WHENEVER THERE'S A REAL ARTISTIC OCCASION FOR IT, not otherwise.
Verse-music is never with him a mere literary indulgence.
The grotesquerie of rhythm and rhyme which some of his poems exhibit,
is as organic as any other feature of his language-shaping,
and shows the rarest command of language. He has been charged with
having "failed to reach continuous levels of musical phrasing".
It's a charge which every one who appreciates Browning's verse
in its higher forms (and its higher forms are not those which are
addressed especially to the physical ear) will be very ready to admit.
In the general tenor of his poetry, he is ABOVE the Singer, --
he is the Seer and Revealer, who sees great truths beyond the bounds
of the territory of general knowledge, instead of working over truths
within that territory; and no seer of modern times has had his eyes
more clearly purged with euphrasy and rue. Poetry is with him,
in the language of Mr. E. Paxton Hood (`Eclectic and Congregational Rev.',
Dec., 1868), "no jingle of words, or pretty amusement
for harpsichord or piano, but rather a divine trigonometry,
a process of celestial triangulation, a taking observations of
celestial places and spheres, an attempt to estimate our world,
its place, its life amidst the boundless immeasurable sweeps
of space and time; or if describing, then describing
the animating stories of the giants, how they fought and fell,
or conquered. . .a great all-inclusive strength of song,
which is as a battle march to warriors, or as the refreshment
of brooks and dates to the spent and toiling soldiers on their way,
is more than the pretty idyll, whose sweet and plaintive story
pleases the idle hour or idle ear."

The Rev. Prof. E. Johnson, in the section entitled `Poets of the Ear
and of the Eye', of his valuable paper on `Conscience and Art