Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead
Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft
is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's. In a cleft of
the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all
the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85]
strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and
Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno. A like instinct allures
him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which
something else explores and occupies,--the image of the sheath; the
image of the cup. But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient,
kind of angularity. Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a "sharp
tree--a cypress--rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o'er-crusted,"--in all
points a thoroughly Browningesque tree.

[Footnote 81: _Sordello_.]

[Footnote 82: This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with
Donne; cf. _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 46: "Music should enwrap the thought, as
Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee."]

[Footnote 83: _Porphyria_.]

[Footnote 84: _De Gustibus_.]

[Footnote 85: _Pan and Luna_.]

[Footnote 86: E.g., _Balaustion's Adventure_; Proem.]

And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not