brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent emotion.  But their “artificiality” was an added attraction.  The wedge, for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man’s wit and driven home by his muscle.  The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter’s wheel, and flashing at the festal board.  His delight in complex technicalities, in the tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in mere intricacy as such.  His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist Man.  He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous achievements of art.  If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa’s chamber as from a wine-bowl; and Fifine’s ear is

“cut
Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122]

[Footnote 122:  Fifine at the Fair, ii. 325.]

Sordello’s slowly won lyric speech is called

                          “a rude
      Armour ... hammered out, in time to be
      Approved beyond the Roman panoply
      Melted to make it."[123]

[Footnote 123:  Sordello, i. 135.]

And thirty years later he used the kindred but more recondite simile of a ring with its fortifying alloy, to symbolise the welded Wahrheit and Dichtung of his greatest poem.

Between Dichtung and Wahrheit there was, indeed, in Browning’s mind, a closer affinity than that simile suggests.  His imagination was a factor in his apprehension of truth; his “poetry” cannot be detached from his interpretation of life, nor his interpretation of life from his poetry.  Not that all parts of his apparent teaching belong equally to his poetic mind.  On the contrary, much of it was derived from traditions of which he never shook himself clear; much from the exercise of a speculative reason which, though incomparably agile, was neither well disciplined in its methods nor particularly original in its grasp of principles.  But with the vitalising heart of his faith neither tradition nor reasoning had so much to do as that logic of the imagination by which great poets often implicitly enunciate what the after-thinker slowly works out.  The characteristic ways of Browning’s poetry, the fundamental joys on which it fed, of which the present chapter attempts an account, by no means define the range or the limits of his interpreting intellect, but they mark the course of its deepest currents, the permanent channels which its tides overflow, but to which in the last resort they return.  In the following chapter we shall have to study these fluctuating movements of his explicit and formulated thought, and to distinguish, if we may, the ground-tone of the deep waters from the more resonant roll of the shifting tides.