, reflect not
merely his agility of mind but his aesthetic relish for the Gothic
richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop of St Praxed's
monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,--anxious entreaty to
his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger
tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting
phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his
"chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus,
advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment."
Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured
by vivid moments,--the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through
rifts and chinks. A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a
brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a
moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin
Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the
whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the "splendid minute and no
more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in
"some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[117] or utters
the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back
on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was
missed. "It once might have been, once only," is the refrain of the
lover's regret in Browning, as "once and only once and for one only" is
the keynote of his triumph. In the contours of event and circumstance,
as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not
harmonious curve. "Our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,"--

"The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist;"

where an alien strain violently crosses the natural course of kind; and
these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always
allured and detained Browning's imagination, though it was not always
the source of its highest achievement. Ivanovitch, executing justice
under the forms of murder, Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms
of an elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved by an abrupt
reminiscence,--it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the
meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that
Browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who
represent any class or kind at all.

[Footnote 117: _By the Fireside_.]

The