Browning’s genial violence continually produced strokes which only needed a little access of oddity or extravagance to become grotesque.  He probably inherited a bias in this direction; we know that his father delighted in drawing grotesque heads, and even “declared that he could not draw a pretty face."[104] But his grotesqueness is never the mere comic oddness which sometimes assumes the name.  It is a kind of monstrosity produced not by whimsical mutilations, but by a riot of exuberant power.  And he has also a grave and tragic use of the grotesque, in which he stands alone.  He is, in fact, by far the greatest English master of grotesque. Childe Roland, where the natural bent of his invention has full fling, abounds with grotesque traits which, instead of disturbing the romantic atmosphere, infuse into it an element of strange, weird, and uncanny mirth, more unearthly than any solemnity; the day shooting its grim red leer across the plain, the old worn-out horse with its red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain; or, in Paracelsus, the “Cyclops-like” volcanoes “staring together with their eyes on flame,” in whose “uncouth pride” God tastes a pleasure.  Shelley had recoiled from the horrible idea of a host of these One-eyed monsters;[105] Browning deliberately invokes it.  But he can use grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance.  One source of the peculiar poignancy of the Heretic’s Tragedy is the eerie blend in it of mocking familiarity and horror.

[Footnote 104:  H. Corkran, Celebrities and I.]

[Footnote 105:  Cf.  Locock, Examination of the Shelley MSS. in the Bodleian, p. 19.  At the words “And monophalmic (sic) Polyphemes who haunt the pine-hills, flocked,” the writing becomes illegible and the stanza is left incomplete.  Mr Forman explains the breaking-off in the same way.]

Yet it was not always in this brutal and violent guise that Browning imagined power.  He was “ever a fighter,” and had a sense as keen as Byron’s, and far more joyous, for storm and turbulence; but he had also, as Byron had not, the finer sense which feels the universe tense with implicit energies, and the profoundest silences of Nature oppressive with the burden of life straining to the birth.  The stars in Saul “beat with emotion” and “shot out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge,” and a “gathered intensity” is “brought to the grey of the hills”; upon the lovers of In a Balcony evening comes “intense with yon first trembling star.”  Wordsworth’s “quiet” is lonely, pensive, and serene; his stars are not beating with emotion, but “listening quietly.”  Browning’s is hectic, bodeful, high-strung.  The vast featureless Campagna is instinct with “passion,” and its “peace with joy."[106]

     “Quietude—­that’s a universe in germ—­
      The dormant passion needing but a look
      To burst into immense life."[107]

[Footnote 106:  Two in the Campagna.]