are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every
jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of
continuity. His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit
their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes
the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the
morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning
against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating
or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]--"one gloom, a rift of fire, another
gloom,"--the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue."
"Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves--all that I love
heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's
senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is
merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine"
intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf
needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields
look _rough_ with hoary dew"?[78] In the _Easter-Day_ vision he sees the
sky as a network of black serrated ridges. He loves the intricate play
of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface
which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old
lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked
out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a
scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers,
and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,--such things are the
familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy. His metrical
movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects--verse-rhythm
and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to
coincide.[80]

[Footnote 72: _E.B. to R.B._, Jan. 19, 1846.]