480.] [Footnote 101: _Englishman in Italy_, i.

396.] And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in savage words.

He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids.

Both poets found their good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force.

Dante, in a famous chapter of the _De Vulgari Eloquio_[102] laid down a fourfold distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and roughness,--to prefer the "combed" and the "shaggy" to the "tousled" and the "sleek." All four kinds had their function in the versatile technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while Tennyson's vocabulary is focussed among the "combed" in the direction of the "sleek," Browning's centres in the "shaggy," verging towards the "tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but "All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee," though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like "Irks care the crop-full bird?
Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast ?" [Footnote 102: _De Vulg.