In this spirit Browning had already cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and had been greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young lady poet, Miss Barrett.
That impression was indeed amply justified.

In a time when it was thought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its very weakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which was open to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured.

When she erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, a straining after violent metaphors.

With her reappeared in poetry a certain element which had not been present in it since the last days of Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary human passion with something which can only be described as wit, a certain love of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, and of brazen paradox and antithesis.

We find this hot wit, as distinct from the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneries of Shakespeare.