These poems are astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.
Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly described them.

It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the filmy insect in the sunshine.

I give a few examples.

Mortal man could not see a lynx more clearly than Karshish-- A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear; Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls.
And the very soul of the Eagle is in this question-- Ask the geier-eagle why she stoops at once Into the vast and unexplored abyss, What full-grown power informs her from the first, Why she not marvels, strenuously beating The silent boundless regions of the sky! He has watched the heavy-winged osprey in its haunts, fain to fly, but forced the earth his couch to make Far inland, till his friend the tempest wake, on whose fiercer wings he can flap his own into activity.
In _Caliban upon Setebos_, as would naturally be the case, animal life is everywhere; and how close to truth, how keenly observed it is, how the right points for description are chosen to make us feel the beast and bird in a single line; how full of colour, how flashed into words which seem like colours, the descriptions are, any animal-lover may hear in the few lines I quote: Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye.
By moonlight.
That is enough to prove his power.

And the animals are seen, not as a cultured person sees them, but as a savage, with his eyes untroubled by thoughts, sees them; for Browning, with his curious self-transmuting power, has put himself into the skin of Caliban.