“the wings unfurled
      That sleep in the worm, they say.”

Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses.  He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter Bell himself.  He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much.  His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path.  By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the “sound of alien melancholy” given out from the mountains before a storm.  The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities.  He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape.  Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity.  And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space—­relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle.  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.