We see his ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long for Salinguerra, or Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban.

The representations are then human enough, with this kind of humanity, but they might have been left to prose.
Poetry has no business to build its houses on the waste and leprous lands of human nature; and less business to call its work art.

Realism of this kind is not art, it is science.
Yet the poems are not scientific, for they have no clarity of argument.
Their wanderings of thought are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on league after league of high grasslands.

When one has a fancy to follow them, the pursuit is entertaining; but unless one has the fancy, there are livelier employments.

Their chief interest is the impression they give us of a certain side of Browning's character.