And Mont Blanc himself is half effaced by his "earth-brood" of aiguilles,--"needles red and white and green, Horns of silver, fangs of crystal, set on edge in his demesne."[91] [Footnote 87: _Caliban on Setebos_.] [Footnote 88: _A Lover's Quarrel_.] [Footnote 89: _Pan and Luna_.] [Footnote 90: _The Heretic's Tragedy_.] [Footnote 91: _La Saisiaz_.] Browning's joy in abrupt and intricate form had then a definite root in his own nervous and muscular energy.

It was no mere preference which might be indulged or not, but an instinctive bias, which deeply affected his way not only of imagining but of conceiving the relations of things.
In this brilliant visual speech of sharply cut angles and saliences, of rugged incrustations, and labyrinthine multiplicity, Browning's romantic hunger for the infinite had to find its expression; and it is clear that the bias implicit in speech imposed itself in some points upon the matter it conveyed.

Abrupt demarcations cut off soul from body, and man from God; the infinite habitually presented itself to him as something, not transcending and comprehending the finite, but _beginning where the finite stopped_,--Eternity at the end of Time.

But the same imaginative passion for form which imposed some concrete limitations upon the Absolute deprived it also of the vagueness of abstraction.

Browning's divinity is very finite, but also amazingly real and near; not "interfused" with the world, which is full of stubborn distinctness, but permeating it through and through, "curled inextricably round about" all its beauty and its power,[92] "intertwined" with earth's lowliest existence, and thrilling with answering rapture to every throb of life.
The doctrine of God's "immanence" was almost a commonplace with Browning's generation.