sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it
found, and sharply marking off the future from the past. The same bias
of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt
angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies
of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe. His
geology neglects the æons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow
stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten
ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian
God. He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud
"bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree
breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom
born in a night. The "metamorphoses of plants,"[108] which fascinated
Goethe by their inner continuity, arrest Browning by their outward
abruptness: that the flower is implicit in the leaf was a fact of much
less worth for him than that the bud suddenly passes into something so
unlike it as the flower. The gradual coming on of spring among the
mountains concentrates itself for him in one instant of epic
sublimity,--that in which the mountain unlooses its year's load of
sound, and

"Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his
feet."[109]

[Footnote 108: _Metamorphose der Pflanzen_.]

[Footnote 109: _Saul_.]

Even in the gradual ebb of day he discovers a pregnant instant in which
day dies:--