"
This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied
oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death."
Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in
a dead man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habitually lured
into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or
shredded,--as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: Akiba,--

"the comb
Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[98]

or Hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with
blood and morsels of his flesh."[99]

[Footnote 98: _Joch. Halk._]

[Footnote 99: _Artemis Prol._]

This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds.
By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet
who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of
musicians _par excellence_, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings,
of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation
mated with barbarism, "like Jove in a thatched house."

Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its
intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his
palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies
of his fugue. But the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to
vivacious expression than some "gruff hinge's invariable scold,"[100] or
the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[101] or the
hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old
organist, in fancy, down the "rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs" of his
lightless loft. There was much in him of his own Hamelin rats' alacrity
of response to sounds "as of scraping tripe" and squeezing apples, and
the rest. Milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of
Paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell. Browning would
have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for
other forms of robust malignity.

[Footnote 100: _Christmas Eve_, i. 480.]

[Footnote 101: _Englishman in Italy_, i. 396.]

And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in
savage words. He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and
explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids. Both poets found their
good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid
simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force. Dante, in