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._]

[Footnote 107: _Asolando: Inapprehensiveness_.]

Half the romantic spell of _Childe Roland_ lies in the wonderful
suggestion of impending catastrophe. The gloom is alive with mysterious
and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything
suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real,
until the decisive moment when Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose.

For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently