Music appealed to him by its imaginative suggestiveness, or by its intricate technique; as the mine from which Abt Vogler reared his palace, the loom on which Master Hugues wove the intertwining harmonies of his fugue.  But the most dulcet harmony aroused him less surely to vivacious expression than some “gruff hinge’s invariable scold,"[100] or the quick sharp rattle of rings down the net-poles,[101] or the hoof-beat of a galloping horse, or the grotesque tumble of the old organist, in fancy, down the “rotten-runged, rat-riddled stairs” of his lightless loft.  There was much in him of his own Hamelin rats’ alacrity of response to sounds “as of scraping tripe” and squeezing apples, and the rest.  Milton contrasted the harmonious swing of the gates of Paradise with the harsh grinding of the gates of hell.  Browning would have found in the latter a satisfaction subtly allied to his zest for other forms of robust malignity.

[Footnote 100:  Christmas Eve, i. 480.]

[Footnote 101:  Englishman in Italy, i. 396.]

And with his joy in savage images went an even more pronounced joy in savage words.  He loved the grinding, clashing, and rending sibilants and explosives as Tennyson the tender-hefted liquids.  Both poets found their good among Saxon monosyllables, but to Tennyson they appealed by limpid simplicity, to Browning by gnarled and rugged force.  Dante, in a famous chapter of the De Vulgari Eloquio[102] laid down a fourfold distinction among words on the analogy of the varying texture of the hair; enjoining the poet to avoid both the extremes of smoothness and roughness,—­to prefer the “combed” and the “shaggy” to the “tousled” and the “sleek.”  All four kinds had their function in the versatile technique of Browning and Tennyson; but it is safe to say that while Tennyson’s vocabulary is focussed among the “combed” in the direction of the “sleek,” Browning’s centres in the “shaggy,” verging towards the “tousled."[103] The utmost sweetness is his when he will; it is the counterpart of his pure intensity of colouring, and of the lyric loveliness of his Pippas and Pompilias; but

     “All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee,”

though genuine Browning, is not distinctively and unmistakably his, like

     “Irks care the crop-full bird?  Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?”

[Footnote 102:  De Vulg.  Eloq., ii. 8.]

[Footnote 103:  Making allowance, of course, for the more “shaggy” and “tousled” character of the English vocabulary as a whole, compared with Italian.]