verse-rhythm
and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to
coincide.[80]

[Footnote 72: _E.B. to R.B._, Jan. 19, 1846.]

[Footnote 73: _To E.B.B._, Jan. 5, 1846.]

[Footnote 74: _By the Fireside_.]

[Footnote 75: _Old Pictures in Florence_.]

[Footnote 76: _Sordello_, i. 181.]

[Footnote 77: Jan. 5, 1846, apropos of a poem by Horne. The "love" may
refer to Horne's description of these things, but it matters little for
the present purpose.]

[Footnote 78: _Home Thoughts_.]

[Footnote 79: _Karshish_, i. 515. Cf. _Englishman in Italy_, i. 397.]

[Footnote 80: Cf., _e.g._, his treatment of the six-line stanza.]

Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief. Every rift in
the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the
recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it. Sordello's
palace is "a maze of corridors,"--"dusk winding stairs, dim galleries."
He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and
scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the
lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber
drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod. When Keats describes
the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the
loveliness he sees:--

"And still she slept an _azure-lidded_ sleep."

Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead
Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft
is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft of
the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all
the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85]
strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and
Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures
him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which
something else explores and occupies,--the image of the sheath; the
image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient,
kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp
tree--a cypress--rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"--in all
points a thoroughly Browningesque tree.

[Footnote 81: _Sordello_.]

[Footnote 82: This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with
Donne; cf. _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 46: "Music should enwrap the thought, as
Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee."]

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