of obscurity.  You never are misty, not even in Sordello—­never vague.  Your graver cuts deep sharp lines, always,—­and there is an extra distinctness in your images and thoughts, from the midst of which, crossing each other infinitely, the general significance seems to escape."[72] That is the overplus of form producing obscurity.  But through immense tracts of Browning the effect of the extra-distinctness of his images and thoughts, of the deep sharp lines cut by his graver, is not thus frustrated, but tells to the full in amazingly vivid and unforgettable expression.  Yet he is no more a realist of the ordinary type here than in his colouring.  His deep sharp lines are caught from life, but under the control of a no less definite bias of eye and brain.  Sheer nervous and muscular energy had its part here also.  As he loved the intense colours which most vigorously stimulate the optic nerve, so he delighted in the angular, indented, intertwining, labyrinthine varieties of line and surface which call for the most delicate, and at the same time the most agile, adjustments of the muscles of the eye.  He caught at the edges of things—­the white line of foam against the shore, the lip of the shell, and he could compare whiteness as no other poet ever did to “the bitten lip of hate.”  He once saw with delight “a solitary bee nipping a leaf round till it exactly fitted the front of a hole."[73] Browning’s joy in form was as little epicurean as his joy in colour; it was a banquet of the senses in which the sense of motion and energy had the largest part.  Smooth, flowing, rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check, are insipid and profitless to him, and he “welcomes the rebuff” of every jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of continuity.  His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they “fit their teeth to the polished block” of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes the “sharp-curled” olive-leaves as they “print the blue sky” above the morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]—­“one gloom, a rift of fire, another gloom,”—­the brilliant line of Venice suspended “between blue and blue.”  “Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves—­all that I love heartily,” he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men’s senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its “labyrinthine” intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of “fairy-cups and elf needles.”  And who else would have thought of saying that “the fields look rough with hoary dew"?[78] In the Easter-Day vision he sees the sky as a network of black serrated ridges.  He loves the intricate play of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, “like an old lion’s