Smooth, flowing, rounded, undulating outlines, which the eye glides along without check, are insipid and profitless to him, and he "welcomes the rebuff" of every jagged excrescence or ragged fray, of every sudden and abrupt breach of continuity.

His eye seizes the crisp indentations of ferns as they "fit their teeth to the polished block" of a grey boulder-stone;[74] seizes the "sharp-curled" olive-leaves as they "print the blue sky" above the morning glories of Florence;[75] seizes the sharp zigzag of lightning against the Italian midnight, the fiery west through a dungeon grating or a lurid rift in the clouds,[76]--"one gloom, a rift of fire, another gloom,"-- the brilliant line of Venice suspended "between blue and blue." "Cup-mosses and ferns and spotty yellow leaves--all that I love heartily," he wrote to E.B.B.[77] Roses and moss strike most men's senses by a soft luxuriance in which all sharp articulation of parts is merged; but what Browning seizes on in the rose is its "labyrinthine" intricacy, while the moss becomes a little forest of "fairy-cups and elf needles." And who else would have thought of saying that "the fields look _rough_ with hoary dew" ?[78] In the _Easter-Day_ vision he sees the sky as a network of black serrated ridges.

He loves the intricate play of light and shade, and the irregular, contorted, honeycombed surface which produces it; craggy, scarred, indented mountains, "like an old lion's cheek-teeth";[79] old towns with huddled roofs and towers picked out "black and crooked," like "fretwork," or "Turkish verse along a scimitar"; old walls, creviced and crannied, intertwined with creepers, and tenanted by crossing swarms of ever-busy flies,--such things are the familiar commonplace of Browning's sculpturesque fancy.

His metrical movements are full of the same joy in "fretwork" effects--verse-rhythm and sense-rhythm constantly crossing where the reader expects them to coincide.[80] [Footnote 72: _E.B.to R.B._, Jan.

19, 1846.] [Footnote 73: _To E.B.B._, Jan.