cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked out “black and crooked,” like “fretwork,” or “Turkish verse along a scimitar”; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers, and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,—­such things are the familiar commonplace of Browning’s sculpturesque fancy.  His metrical movements are full of the same joy in “fretwork” effects—­verse-rhythm and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to coincide.[80]

[Footnote 72:  E.B. to R.B., Jan. 19, 1846.]

[Footnote 73:  To E.B.B., Jan. 5, 1846.]

[Footnote 74:  By the Fireside.]

[Footnote 75:  Old Pictures in Florence.]

[Footnote 76:  Sordello, i. 181.]

[Footnote 77:  Jan. 5, 1846, apropos of a poem by Horne.  The “love” may refer to Horne’s description of these things, but it matters little for the present purpose.]

[Footnote 78:  Home Thoughts.]

[Footnote 79:  Karshish, i. 515.  Cf. Englishman in Italy, i. 397.]

[Footnote 80:  Cf., e.g., his treatment of the six-line stanza.]

Nor was his imaginative sculpture confined to low-relief.  Every rift in the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it.  Sordello’s palace is “a maze of corridors,”—­“dusk winding stairs, dim galleries.”  He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and scent that lie within the “loaded curls” of his lady, and irradiates the lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod.  When Keats describes the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the loveliness he sees:—­

     “And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep.”

Browning’s mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead Porphyria “ensconced” within its eyelid, “like a bee in a bud.”  A cleft is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley’s.  In a cleft of the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85] strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno.  A like instinct allures him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which something else explores and occupies,—­the image of the sheath; the image of the cup.  But he is equally allured by the opposite, or salient, kind of angularity.  Beside the Calabrian seaside house stands a “sharp tree—­a cypress—­rough iron-spiked, ripe fruit o’er-crusted,”—­in all points a thoroughly Browningesque tree.

[Footnote 81:  Sordello.]

[Footnote 82:  This turn of fancy was one of his points of affinity with Donne; cf. R.B. to E.B.B., i. 46:  “Music should enwrap the thought, as Donne says an amber drop enwraps a bee.”]