lling with answering rapture to every throb of life.
The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with
Browning's generation. Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative
speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of
Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete
sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the
labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently
suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which
Emerson's ideality ignored.

[Footnote 92: _Easter-Day_, xxx.]

VI.

3. JOY IN POWER.

Browning was thus announced, we have seen, even by his splendour of
colouring and his rich and clear-cut plasticity, as something more than
a feaster upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more
of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom
nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a
temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a
passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and
imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing
pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it
was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in
the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it
remained firmly rooted to the last. As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere,
and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power. If he later "saw Love as
plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional,
aspect of Love which caught his eye. His sense of Power played a yet
more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense
of form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive
instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the
whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the
sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility
which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.

[Footnote 93: _Asolando: Reverie._]

No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning. His associates
tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like
thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration
of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short
work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostli