cation; it is not the slow
stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten
ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian
God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud
"bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree
breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom
born in a night. The "metamorphoses of plants,"[108] which fascinated
Goethe by their inner continuity, arrest Browning by their outward
abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much
less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so
unlike it as the flower. The gradual coming on of spring among the
mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic
sublimity,--that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of
sound, and

"Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his
feet."[109]

[Footnote 108: _Metamorphose der Pflanzen_.]

[Footnote 109: _Saul_.]

Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which
day dies:--

"For note, when evening shuts,
A certain moment cuts
The deed off, calls the glory from the grey."

Hence his love of images which convey these sudden transformations,--the
worm, putting forth in autumn its "two wondrous winglets,"[110] the
"transcendental platan," breaking into foliage and flower at the summit
of its smooth tall bole; the splendour of flame leaping from the dull
fuel of gums and straw. In such images we see how the simple joy in
abrupt changes of sensation which belonged to his riotous energy of
nerve lent support to his peremptory way of imagining all change and
especially all vital and significant becoming. For Browning's trenchant
imagination things were not gradually evolved; a sudden touch loosed the
springs of latent power, or an overmastering energy from without rushed
in like a flood. With all his connoisseur's delight in technique,
language and sound were only spells which unlocked a power beyond their
capacity to express. Music was the "burst of pillared cloud by day and
pillared fire by night," starting up miraculously from the barren
wilderness of mechanical expedients,[111] and poetry "the sudden
rose"[112] "breaking in" at the bidding of a "brace of rhymes." That in
such transmutations Browning saw one of the most marvellous of human
powers we may gather from the famous