And his clefts are as incomplete without some wild bit of fierce or frightened life in their grip as are Shelley's caves without some form of unearthly maidenhood in their embrace.[95] His mountains--so rarely the benign pastoral presences of Wordsworth--are not only craggy and rough, but invisible axes have hewn and mutilated them,--they are fissured and cloven and "scalped" and "wind-gashed." When they thrust their mighty feet into the plain and "entwine base with base to knit strength more intensely,"[96] the image owes its grandeur to the double suggestion of sinewy power and intertwined limbs.

Still grander, but in the same style, is the sketch of Hildebrand in _Sordello_:-- "See him stand Buttressed upon his mattock, Hildebrand Of the huge brain-mask welded ply o'er ply As in a forge; ...

teeth clenched, The neck tight-corded too, the chin deep-trenched, As if a cloud enveloped him while fought Under its shade, grim prizers, thought with thought At deadlock."[97] [Footnote 95: Cf.

_Prometheus Unbound_, passim.] [Footnote 96: _Saul_.] [Footnote 97: _Sordello_, i.

171.] When the hoary cripple in _Childe Roland_ laughs, his mouth-edge is "pursed and scored" with his glee; and his scorn must not merely be uttered, but _written_ with his crutch "in the dusty thoroughfare." This idea is resumed yet more dramatically in the image of the palsied oak, cleft like "a distorted mouth that splits its rim gaping at death." Later on, thrusting his spear into the gloom, he fancies it "tangled in a dead man's hair or beard." Similarly, Browning is habitually lured into expressive detail by the idea of smooth surfaces frayed or shredded,--as of flesh torn with teeth or spikes: Akiba,-- "the comb Of iron carded, flesh from bone, away,"[98] or Hippolytus, ruined on the "detested beach" that was "bright with blood and morsels of his flesh."[99] [Footnote 98: _Joch.