nt white-wedge eye
By moonlight;"

or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in _The Glove_ or the
bright aethereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's
head, with its

"membraned wings
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused;"[120]

or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect. "I always love
those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss
Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy
minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [121]

[Footnote 119: _Donald_.]

[Footnote 120: Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent
chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.]

[Footnote 121: _To E.B.B._, 5th Jan. 1846.]

Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of
lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent. To
bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or
built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to
acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly
found in any other poet in the same degree. The "artificial products" of
civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of
poetic expression but springs of poetic joy. No poetry can dispense with
images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always
reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are
better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect"
added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it
added for Wordsworth. His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers
or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and
sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses,
ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his
joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent
emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge,
for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending
thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his
muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of
the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing
at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the
tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of
Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of m