visaging existence found little support
in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath
which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ
aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which
perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted
how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or
beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other
things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter
Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye
and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much.
His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians
flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music
across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could
see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in
twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the
"sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm.
The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual
and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and
texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the
translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but
aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an
eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations
which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle.
There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a
geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his
very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary
account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life
that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its
natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to
clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time
thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more
his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted
and been happy--no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was
the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a
lifetime of trying at the lock.

[Footnote 62: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 24.]

[Footnote 63: Mrs Browning's _Letters_, March 18