But it is the volubility of a consummate master of expression, in whose hands the difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses of Browning's genius lurked so near--so vitally near--to the roots of the sublime..