[Footnote 83:  Porphyria.]

[Footnote 84:  De Gustibus.]

[Footnote 85:  Pan and Luna.]

[Footnote 86:  E.g., Balaustion’s Adventure; Proem.]

And so, corresponding to the cleft-like array of sheaths and cups, a not less prolific family of spikes and wedges and swords runs riot in Browning’s work.  The rushing of a fresh river-stream into the warm ocean tides crystallises into the “crystal spike between two warm walls of wave;"[87] “air thickens,” and the wind, grown solid, “edges its wedge in and in as far as the point would go."[88] The fleecy clouds embracing the flying form of Luna clasp her as close “as dented spine fitting its flesh."[89] The fiery agony of John the heretic is a plucking of sharp spikes from his rose.[90] Lightning is a bright sword, plunged through the pine-tree roof.  And Mont Blanc himself is half effaced by his “earth-brood” of aiguilles,—­“needles red and white and green, Horns of silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[91]

[Footnote 87:  Caliban on Setebos.]

[Footnote 88:  A Lover’s Quarrel.]

[Footnote 89:  Pan and Luna.]

[Footnote 90:  The Heretic’s Tragedy.]

[Footnote 91:  La Saisiaz.]

Browning’s joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular energy.  It was no mere preference which might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things.  In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning’s romantic hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the matter it conveyed.  Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something, not transcending and comprehending the finite, but beginning where the finite stopped,—­Eternity at the end of Time.  But the same imaginative passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction.  Browning’s divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not “interfused” with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but permeating it through and through, “curled inextricably round about” all its beauty and its power,[92] “intertwined” with earth’s lowliest existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life.  The doctrine of God’s “immanence” was almost a commonplace with Browning’s generation.  Browning turned the doctrine into imaginative speech equalled in impressiveness by that of Carlyle and by that of Emerson, but distinguished from both by an eager articulating concrete sensibility which lifts into touch with supreme Good all the labyrinthine multiplicity of existence which Carlyle impatiently suppressed, while it joyously accentuates the sharp dissonances which Emerson’s ideality ignored.