monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.

[Footnote 94: Mr E. Gosse, in _Dict. of N.B._]

"Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage;
Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank
Soil to a plash?"

he asks in _Childe Roland_,--altogether an instructive example of the
ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a
deliberately fantastic theme. Hear again with what savage joy his Moon
"rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping
with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely _broke its
woof_. So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines
writhe in rows each impaled on its stake."

His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their
intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart
which they result from or produce. And his clefts are as incomplete
without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are
Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their
embrace.[95] His mountains--so rarely the benign pastoral presences of
Wordsworth--are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn
and mutilated them,--they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and
"wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and
"entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image
owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and
intertwined limbs. Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch
of Hildebrand in _Sordello_:--