re his first fine careless rapture." Suffering enters Browning's
poetry almost never as the artless wail of the helpless stricken thing;
the intolerable pathos of _Ye Banks and Braes_, or of

"We twa hae paidl't in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,"

belonged to a side of primitive emotion to which "artificial" poets like
Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest
him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as
in _The Confessional_, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated
spirit, as in _Any Wife to any Husband_, or _A Woman's Last Word_; or
into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in _The Worst
of It_ or _James Lee's Wife_. And happiness, equally,--even the lover's
happiness,--needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of
challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or
something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to
brave. Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang,
when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the
perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_By the
Fireside_)--

"Oh, the little more, and how much it is!
And the little less, and what worlds away!
How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!"

Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts
of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul
itself. The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords
of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very
genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs
than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative
selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the
lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his
types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights
of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the
marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue,
angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:--

"Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
He hath watched hunt with that sla