Not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail outside Triest, in which Waring—­the Flying Englishman—­is seen “with great grass hat and kerchief black,” looking up for a moment, showing his “kingly throat,” till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, “into the rose and golden half of the sky.”  And what animal-painter has given more of the leonine wrath in mane and tail and fixed wide eyes than Browning has conveyed into his lion of King Francis with three strokes of the brush?  Or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer’s eye is fixed, and we get the word of Rudel: 

    And therefore bask the bees
    On my flower’s breast, as on a platform broad.

Or—­a grief to booklovers!—­the same eye is occupied by all the grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking in the plum tree’s crevice of Browning’s Garden Fancy, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[33] Or it is night and moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment—­before love enters—­all the mind of the impressionist artist lives merely in the eye: 

    The grey sea and the long black land;
    And the yellow half-moon large and low;
    And the startled little waves that leap
    In fiery ringlets from their sleep
    As I gain the cove with pushing prow.

If Browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits—­and in the letters to Miss Barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a reference to his pale thin face as seen in a mirror—­he had certainly the imagination of perfect vitality and of those “wild joys of living,” sung by the young harper David in that poem of Saul, which appeared as a fragment in the Bells and Pomegranates, and as a whole ten years later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture of the senses.[34]

Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one The Pied Piper, was written in the spirit of mere play and was included in Bells and Pomegranates only to make up a number, for which the printer required more copy.  One or two—­the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and Hungary, Claret and Tokay, are no more than clever caprices of the fancy.  One, The Lost Lender, remotely suggested by the conservatism of Wordsworth’s elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly detached from direct personal reference to Wordsworth, expresses Browning’s liberal sentiment in politics.  One, the stately Artemis Prologuizes, is the sole remaining fragment of a classical drama, “Hippolytus and Aricia,” composed in 1840, “much against my endeavour,” wrote the poet,—­a somewhat enigmatical phrase—­“while in bed with a fever.”  A considerable number of the poems may be grouped together as expressions or demonstrations of various passions, central among which is the passion of love.  A few, and these conspicuous for their masterly handling of novel themes, treat of art, and the feeling for art as seen in the painter of pictures or in the connoisseur.  Nor is the interpretation of religious emotion—­though in a phase that may be called abnormal—­wholly forgotten.