ory nerve, with the intensity of a new experience,
still attack the eye and ear _as_ he writes his _Englishman in Italy_,
and by virtue of their eager obsession demand and summon forth the
appropriate word.[32] The fisherman from Amalfi pitches down his basket
before us,

All trembling alive
With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit,
--You touch the strange lumps,
And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner
Of horns and of humps.

Or it is the "quick rustle-down of the quail-nets," or the "whistling
pelt" of the olives, when Scirocco is loose, that invades our ears. And
by and by among the mountains the play of the senses expands, and the
soul has its great word to utter:

God's own profound
Was above me, and round me the mountains,
And under, the sea,
And within me, my heart to bear witness
hat was and shall be.

Not less vivid is the vision of the light craft with its lateen sail
outside Triest, in which Waring--the Flying Englishman--is seen "with
great grass hat and kerchief black," looking up for a moment, showing
his "kingly throat," till suddenly in the sunset splendour the boat
veers weather-ward and goes off, as with a bound, "into the rose and
golden half of the sky." And what animal-painter has given more of the
leonine wrath in mane and tail and fixed wide eyes than Browning has
conveyed into his lion of King Francis with three strokes of the brush?
Or it is only a bee upon a sunflower on which the gazer's eye is fixed,
and we get the word of Rudel:

And therefore bask the bees
On my flower's breast, as on a platform broad.

Or--a grief to booklovers!--the same eye is occupied by all the
grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking
in the plum tree's crevice of Browning's _Garden Fancy_, which creeps
and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[33] Or it is night and
moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment--before love enters--all
the mind of the impressionist artist lives merely in the eye:

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep
As I gain the cove with pushing prow.

If Browning did not rejoice in perfect health and animal spirits--and in
the letters to Miss Barrett we hear of frequent headaches and find a
reference to his pale thin face as seen in a mirror--he had cer