the rigour of antithesis; Cleon’s mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated pavement, and Blougram’s fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board.  And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he reverted in thought to Miss Blagden’s Florentine garden, the one impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,—­“the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71]

[Footnote 66:  Popularity.]

[Footnote 67:  Sordello.]

[Footnote 68:  Ibid.]

[Footnote 69:  Englishman in Italy.]

[Footnote 70:  By the Fireside.]

[Footnote 71:  Mrs Orr, Life, p. 258.]

Browning’s colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his mind, as sketched above.  It is the colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical.  But it is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and imagination—­the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict.

V.

2.  JOY IN FORM.

If the popular legend of Browning ignores his passion for colour, it altogether scouts the suggestion that he had a peculiar delight in form.  By general consent he lacked the most ordinary and decent attention to it.  No doubt he is partly responsible for this impression himself.  His ideals of literary form were not altogether those commonly recognised in literature.  If we understand by form the quality of clear-cut outline and sharply defined articulation, there is a sense in which it was one of the most ingrained instincts of his nature, indulged at times with even morbid excess.  Alike in life and in art he hated sloth,—­the slovenliness of the “ungirt loin” and of the indecisive touch.  In conduct, this animus expressed itself in a kind of punctilious propriety.  The forms of social convention Browning observed not merely with the scrupulous respect of the man of fashion, but with the enthusiasm of the virtuoso.  Near akin in genius to the high priests of the Romantic temple, Browning rarely, even in the defiant heyday of adolescence, set more than a tentative foot across the outer precincts of the Romantic Bohemia.  His “individualism” was not of the type which overflows in easy affectations; he was too original to be eccentric, too profoundly a man of letters to look “like a damned literary man.”  In his poetry this animus took a less equivocal shape.  Not a little, both of its vividness and of its obscurity, flows from the undisciplined exuberance of his joy in form.  An acute criticism of Mrs Browning’s—­in some points the very best critic he ever had—­puts one aspect of this admirably. The Athenaeum had called him “misty.”  “Misty,” she retorts, “is an infamous word for your kind