a feaster upon colour and form. In his riot of the senses there was more
of the athlete than of the voluptuary. His joy was that of one to whom
nervous and muscular tension was itself a stimulating delight. In such a
temperament the feeling of energy was an elementary instinct, a
passionate obsession, which projected itself through eye and ear and
imagination into the outer world, filling it with the throbbing
pulsations or the clashing conflict of vehement powers. We know that it
was thus with Browning. "From the first Power was, I knew," he wrote in
the last autumn of his life.[93] It was a primitive instinct, and it
remained firmly rooted to the last. As Wordsworth saw Joy everywhere,
and Shelley Love, so Browning saw Power. If he later "saw Love as
plainly," it was the creative and transforming, not the emotional,
aspect of Love which caught his eye. His sense of Power played a yet
more various part in the shaping of his poetic world than did his sense
of form. But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive
instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the
whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the
sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility
which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.

[Footnote 93: _Asolando: Reverie._]

No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning. His associates
tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like
thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration
of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short
work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings
of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the
subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the
vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with