Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul itself.  The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative selection among the countless types of these “low kinds” follows the lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his types of men and women:  here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban’s beasts:—­

     “Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech;
      Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam,
      That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown
      He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye
      By moonlight;”

or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in The Glove or the bright aethereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer’s head, with its

        “membraned wings
      So wonderful, so wide,
      So sun-suffused;"[120]

or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect.  “I always love those wild creatures God sets up for themselves,” he wrote to Miss Barrett, “so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them.” [121]

[Footnote 119:  Donald.]

[Footnote 120:  Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke’s excellent chapter on Browning’s Treatment of Nature.]

[Footnote 121:  To E.B.B., 5th Jan. 1846.]

Finally, Browning’s joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of lifeless things upon which “soul” itself has in any way been spent.  To bear the mark of Man’s art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning’s imagination hardly found in any other poet in the same degree.  The “artificial products” of civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of poetic expression but springs of poetic joy.  No poetry can dispense with images from “artificial” things; Wordsworth himself does not always reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are better known; but for Browning the impress of “our meddling intellect” added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it added for Wordsworth.  His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses, ships, shops.  Most of these appealed also to other instincts,—­to his joy in