tertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for
the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of
the muscles of the eye. He caught at the edges of things--the white line
of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare
whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." He once
saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly
fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning's joy in form was as little
epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which
the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing,
rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check,
are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every
jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of
continuity. His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit
their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes
the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the
morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning
against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating
or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]--"one gloom, a rift of fire, another
gloom,"--the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue."
"Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves--all that I love
heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's
senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is
merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine"
intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf
needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields
look _rough_ with hoary dew"?[78] In the _Easter-Day_ vision he sees the
sky as a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the intricate play
of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface
which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old
lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked
out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a
scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers,
and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,--such things are the
familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical
movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects--