ngs
of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the
subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the
vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with
monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.

[Footnote 94: Mr E. Gosse, in _Dict. of N.B._]

"Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage;
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash?"

he asks in _Childe Roland_,--altogether an instructive example of the
ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a
deliberately fantastic theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon
"rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping
with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely _broke its
woof_. So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines
writhe in rows each impaled on its stake."

His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their
intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart
which they result from or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete
without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are
Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their
embrace.[95] His mountains--so rarely the benign pastoral presences of
Wordsworth--are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn
and mutilated them,--they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and
"wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and
"entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image
owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and
intertwined limbs. Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch
of Hildebrand in _Sordello_:--

"See him stand
Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand
Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply
As in a forge; ... teeth clenched,
The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched,
As if a cloud enveloped him while fought
Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought
At deadlock."[97]

[Footnote 95: Cf. _Prometheus Unbound_, passim.]

[Footnote 96: _Saul_.]

[Footnote 97: _Sordello_, i. 171.]

When the hoary cripple in _Childe Roland_ laughs, his mouth-edge is
"pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be
uttered, but _written_ with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare.