de Vere: A Memoir_, by Wilfrid Ward).] [Footnote 65: _Two Poets of Croisic_.] But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast.

He sees the "old June weather" blue above, and the "great opaque Blue breadth of sea without a break" under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the baked cicala dies of drouth"; and the blue lilies about the harp of golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas--"miles and miles of gold and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a horse--"coal-black"-- careering across it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[68] If he imagines the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in "black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[69] and he neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame of a golden shield.[70] He makes the most of every hint of contrast he finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis; Cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board.
And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he reverted in thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,--"the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71] [Footnote 66: _Popularity_.] [Footnote 67: _Sordello_.] [Footnote 68: Ibid.] [Footnote 69: _Englishman in Italy_.] [Footnote 70: _By the Fireside_.] [Footnote 71: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p.

258.] Browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his mind, as sketched above.

It is the colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical.

But it is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and imagination--the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict.
V.
2.