case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we
saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the
white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour
had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously
occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss
the clue; if they find it, as in _By the Fireside_, the collapse of the
barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked
to explain it.

[Footnote 116: _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 6.]

And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character
Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate
play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "The
care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste," says, in
_Sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia
and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed
walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa
than the "blue breadth of sea without break" expanding before it. The
abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque
contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not
merely his agility of mind but his æsthetic relish for the Gothic
richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop of St Praxed's
monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,--anxious entreaty to
his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger
tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting
phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his
"chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus,
advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment."
Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured