There is a hint of it in an early anecdote. "Why, sir, you are quite a
geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his
very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary
account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life
that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its
natural outlet. When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to
clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time
thrust poetry into the shade. "The more tired he has been, and the more
his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted
and been happy--no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was
the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a
lifetime of trying at the lock.

[Footnote 62: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p. 24.]

[Footnote 63: Mrs Browning's _Letters_, March 1861.]


III.


And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for
Browning's art. If his keen objective senses penned his imagination,
save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal
actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of
choice. The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and
fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed,
and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. It is possible
to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told.
He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling