grotesque effects to heighten tragedy as well as romance. One source of
the peculiar poignancy of the _Heretic's Tragedy_ is the eerie blend in
it of mocking familiarity and horror.

[Footnote 104: H. Corkran, _Celebrities and I_.]

[Footnote 105: Cf. Locock, _Examination of the Shelley MSS. in the
Bodleian_, p. 19. At the words "And monophalmic (_sic_) Polyphemes who
haunt the pine-hills, flocked," the writing becomes illegible and the
stanza is left incomplete. Mr Forman explains the breaking-off in the
same way.]

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
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 aeons of gradual stratifi