for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead--

That is as splendid as the thing itself.

Again, no one can help observing in all these quotations the
extraordinary love of colour, a love Tennyson has in far fainter
measure, but which Browning seems to possess more than any other English
poet. Only Sir Walter Scott approaches him in this. Scott, knowing the
Highlands, knew dark magnificence of colour. But Browning's love of
colour arose from his having lived so long in Italy, where the light is
so pure, clear, and brilliant that colour is more intense, and at dawn
and sunset more deep, delicate, and various than it is in our land.
Sometimes, as Ruskin says, "it is not colour, it is conflagration"; but
wherever it is, in the bell of a flower, on the edge of a cloud, on the
back of a lizard, on the veins of a lichen, it strikes in Browning's
verse at our eyes, and he only, in English poetry, has joy enough in it
to be its full interpreter.

He sees the wild tulip blow out its great red bell; he sees the thin
clear bubble of blood at its tip; he sees the spike of gold which burns
deep in the bluebell's womb; the corals that, like lamps, disperse thick
red flame through the dusk green universe of the ocean; the lakes which,
when the morn breaks,

Blaze like a wyvern flying round the sun;

the woodland brake whose withered fern Dawn feeds with gold; the moon
carried oft at sunrise in purple fire; the larch-blooms crisp and pink;
the sanguine heart of the pomegranate; the filberts russet-sheathed and
velvet-capped; the poppies crimson to blackness; the red fans of the
butterfly falling on the rock like a drop of fire from a brandished
torch; the star-fish, rose-jacynth to the finger-tips; and a hundred
other passionate seizures of colour. And, for the last of these colour
remembrances, in quieter tints--almost in black and white--I quote this
lovely verse from _James Lee's Wife_:

The swallow has set her six young on the rail,
And looks seaward:
The water's in stripes like a snake, olive pale
To the leeward,--
On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.
"Good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"--
Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!

So, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in
colour. They are painted as well as drawn. It is his love of colour
which made at least half of the impulse that