The "silver-grey" lights of dreamy autumn eve were never with more delicate insight rendered in terms of soul.
Suddenly these autumnal half-tones give way to the flash of torches in the fragrant darkness of an Italian night.

There is a scurry of feet along a dark alley, a scuffle at the end, and the genial rotundity of Brother Lippo Lippi's face, impudent, brilliant, insuppressible, leers into the torchlight.

_Fra Lippo Lippi_ is not less true and vivacious than the _Andrea_, if less striking as an example of Browning's dramatic power.

Sarto is a great poetic creation; Browning's own robust temperament provided hardly any aid in delineating the emaciated soul whose gifts had thinned down to a morbid perfection of technique.

But this vigorous human creature, with the teeming brain, and the realist eye, and the incorrigible ineptitude for the restraints of an insincere clerical or other idealism, was a being to which Browning's heart went out; and he even makes him the mouthpiece of literary ideas, which his own portrait as here drawn aptly exemplifies.