sphere, did not wish

"the wings unfurled
That sleep in the worm, they say."

Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist
for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities,
it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support
in the character of his senses. He had not the brooding eye, beneath
which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ
aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which
perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted
how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or
beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other
things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter
Bell himself. He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye
and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much.
His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians
flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music
across his path. By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could
see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in
twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the
"sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm.
The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual
and muscular sensibilities. He makes us vividly aware of surface and
texture, of space, solidity, shape. Matter with him is not the
translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but
aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity. And he had in an
eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations
which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle.