His senses were at once singularly keen and energetic, and singularly capacious of delight; his eyes were active instruments of observation, and at the same time were possessed by a kind of rapture in form--and not least in fantastic form--and a rapture still finer in the opulence and variety of colour.
In these poems we are caught into what may truly be called an enthusiasm of the senses; and presently we find that the senses, good for their own sakes, are good also as inlets to the spirit.

Having returned from his first visit to southern Italy, the sights and sounds, striking upon the retina and the auditory 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 certainly the imagination of perfect vitality and of those "wild joys of living," sung by the young harper David in that poem of _Saul_, which appeared as a fragment in the _Bells and Pomegranates_, and as a whole ten years later, with the awe and rapture of the spirit rising above the rapture of the senses.[34] Of these poems of 1842 and 1845 one _The Pied Piper_, was written in the spirit of mere play and was included in _Bells and Pomegranates_ only to make up a number, for which the printer required more copy.

One or two--the flesh and blood incarnations of the wines of France and Hungary, _Claret_ and _Tokay_, are no more than clever caprices of the fancy.

One, _The Lost Lender_, remotely suggested by the conservatism of Wordsworth's elder days, but possibly deflected by some of the feeling attributed to Pym in relation to Strafford of the drama, and certainly detached from direct personal reference to Wordsworth, expresses Browning's liberal sentiment in politics.