And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for Browning’s art.  If his keen objective senses penned his imagination, save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of choice.  The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed, and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed.  It is possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told.  He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex motory-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,—­feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or “soul,” exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic.  In each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul, Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination, controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work.  To trace these operations in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections.

IV.

1.  JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR.

Browning’s repute as a thinker and “teacher” long overshadowed his glory as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his bold and splendid colouring.  It is true that he is never a colourist pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean.  Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent dispenser, who “provides and not partakes.”  His colouring is not subtle; it recalls neither the aethereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing glow and “verdurous glooms” of Keats, nor the choice and cultured splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense.  He neglects the indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature, or the tender “silvery-grey” of Andrea’s placid perfection.  He dazzles us with scarlet and crimson; with rubies, and blood, and “the poppy’s red effrontery,” with topaz, and amethyst, and the glory of gold, makes the sense ache with the lustre of blue, and heightens the effect of all by the boldest contrast.  Who can doubt that he fell the more readily upon one of his quaintest titles because of the priestly ordinance that the “Pomegranates” were to be “of blue and of purple and of scarlet,” and the “Bells” “of gold”?  He loves the daybreak hour of the world’s awakening vitality as poets of another temper love the twilight; the splendour of sunrise pouring into the chamber of Pippa, and steeping Florence in that “live translucent bath of air"[64]; he loves the blaze of the Italian mid-day—­