profoundly a man of letters to look "like a damned literary man." In his
poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape. Not a little, both of
its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined
exuberance of his joy in form. An acute criticism of Mrs Browning's--in
some points the very best critic he ever had--puts one aspect of this
admirably. _The Athenæum_ had called him "misty." "Misty," she retorts,
"is an infamous word for your kind of obscurity. You never are misty,
not even in _Sordello_--never vague. Your graver cuts deep sharp lines,
always,--and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts,
from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general
significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form
producing obscurity. But through immense tracts of Browning the effect
of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp
lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full
in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression. Yet he is no more a
realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring. His deep sharp
lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite
bias of eye and brain. Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part
here also. As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously
stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented,
intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for
the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of
the muscles of the eye. He caught at the edges of things--the white line
of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare
whiteness as no other poet ever did to "the bitten lip of hate." He once
saw with delight "a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly
fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning's joy in form was as little
epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which
the sense of motion and energy had the largest part. Smooth, flowing,
rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check,