His “clefts” and “wedges” owe their attraction not only to their intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart which they result from or produce.  And his clefts are as incomplete without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are Shelley’s caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their embrace.[95] His mountains—­so rarely the benign pastoral presences of Wordsworth—­are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn and mutilated them,—­they are fissured and cloven and “scalped” and “wind-gashed.”  When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and “entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and intertwined limbs.  Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch of Hildebrand in Sordello:—­

                       “See him stand
      Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand
      Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o’er ply
      As in a forge; ... teeth clenched,
      The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched,
      As if a cloud enveloped him while fought
      Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought
      At deadlock."[97]

[Footnote 95:  Cf. Prometheus Unbound, passim.]

[Footnote 96:  Saul.]

[Footnote 97:  Sordello, i. 171.]

When the hoary cripple in Childe Roland laughs, his mouth-edge is “pursed and scored” with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be uttered, but written with his crutch “in the dusty thoroughfare.”  This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied oak, cleft like “a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death.”  Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it “tangled in a dead man’s hair or beard.”  Similarly, Browning is habitually lured into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or shredded,—­as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes:  Akiba,—­

                            “the comb
      Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[98]

or Hippolytus, ruined on the “detested beach” that was “bright with blood and morsels of his flesh."[99]

[Footnote 98:  Joch.  Halk.]

[Footnote 99:  Artemis Prol.]

This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds.  By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians par excellence, is also the poet of grindings and jostlings, of jars and clashes, of grating hinges and flapping doors; civilisation mated with barbarism, “like Jove in a thatched house.”