[Footnote 116:  R.B. to E.B.B., i. 6.]

And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character Browning’s imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye.  “The care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste,” says, in Sordello, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa than the “blue breadth of sea without break” expanding before it.  The abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not merely his agility of mind but his aesthetic relish for the Gothic richness and fretted intricacy that result.  The bishop of St Praxed’s monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,—­anxious entreaty to his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph.  The larger tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his “chess-board” of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations of “aspiring” and “attainment.”  Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured by vivid moments,—­the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through rifts and chinks.  A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the “splendid minute and no more” in which she is “saved”; the lover’s whole life is summed up in “some moment’s product” when “the soul declares itself,"[117] or utters the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was missed.  “It once might have been, once only,” is the refrain of the lover’s regret in Browning, as “once and only once and for one only” is the keynote of his triumph.  In the contours of event and circumstance, as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not harmonious curve.  “Our interest’s in the dangerous edge of things,”—­

     “The honest thief, the tender murderer,
      The superstitious atheist;”

where an alien strain violently crosses the natural course of kind; and these are only extreme examples of the abnormal nature which always allured and detained Browning’s imagination, though it was not always the source of its highest achievement.  Ivanovitch, executing justice under the forms of murder, Caponsacchi, executing mercy under the forms of an elopement, the savagery of Halbert and Hob unnerved by an abrupt reminiscence,—­it is in these suggestive and pregnant situations, at the meeting-points of apparently irreconcilable classes and kinds, that Browning habitually found or placed those of his characters who represent any class or kind at all.