The vast featureless Campagna is instinct with "passion," and its "peace with joy."[106] "Quietude--that's a universe in germ-- The dormant passion needing but a look To burst into immense life."[107] [Footnote 106: _Two in the Campagna._] [Footnote 107: _Asolando: Inapprehensiveness_.] Half the romantic spell of _Childe Roland_ lies in the wonderful suggestion of impending catastrophe.

The gloom is alive with mysterious and impalpable menace; the encompassing presences which everything suggests and nothing betrays, grow more and more oppressively real, until the decisive moment when Roland's blast suddenly lets them loose.
For the power that Browning rejoiced to imagine was pre-eminently sudden; an unforeseen cataclysm, abruptly changing the conditions it found, and sharply marking off the future from the past.

The same bias of imagination which crowded his inner vision of space with abrupt angular forms tended to resolve the slow, continuous, organic energies of the world before his inner vision into explosion and catastrophe.

His geology neglects the aeons of gradual stratification; it is not the slow stupendous upheaval of continents, but the volcanic uprush of the molten ore among the rocks, which renew the ancient rapture of the Paracelsian God.

He is the poet of the sudden surprises of plant-life: the bud "bursting unaware" into flower, the brushwood about the elm-tree breaking, some April morning, into tiny leaf, the rose-flesh mushroom born in a night.