or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and
sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses,
ships, shops. Most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his
joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent
emotion. But their "artificiality" was an added attraction. The wedge,
for instance, appeals to him not only by its angularity and its rending
thrust, but as a weapon contrived by man's wit and driven home by his
muscle. The cup appeals to him not only by its shape, and by the rush of
the foaming wine, but as fashioned by the potter's wheel, and flashing
at the festal board. His delight in complex technicalities, in the
tangled issues of the law-courts, and the intertwining harmonies of
Bach, sprang from his joy in the play of mind as well as from his joy in
mere intricacy as such. His mountains are gashed and cleft and carved
not only because their intricacy of craggy surface or the Titanic
turmoil of mountain-shattering delights him, but also because he loves
to suggest the deliberate axe or chisel of the warrior or the artist
Man. He turns the quiet vicissitudes of nature into dexterous
achievements of art. If he does not paint or dye the meads, he turns the
sunset clouds into a feudal castle, shattered slowly with a visible
mace; the morning sun pours into Pippa's chamber as from a wine-bowl;
and Fifine's ear is

"cut
Thin as a dusk-leaved rose carved from a cocoanut."[122]

[Footnote 122: _Fifine at the Fair_, ii. 325.]

Sordello's slowly won lyric speech is called

"a rude