And happiness, equally,--even the lover's happiness,--needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or something to forgive, some hostility, or guilt, or absence, or death, to brave.

Or the rapturous union of lovers must be remembered with a pang, when they have quarrelled; or its joy be sobered by recalling the perilous hairbreadth chances incurred in achieving it (_By the Fireside_)-- "Oh, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less, and what worlds away! How a sound shall quicken content to bliss, Or a breath suspend the blood's best play, And life be a proof of this!" Further, his joy in soul drew into the sphere of his poetry large tracts of existence which lay wholly or partly outside the domain of soul itself.

The world of the lower animals hardly touched the deeper chords of his thought or emotion; but he watched their activities with a very genuine and constant delight, and he took more account of their pangs than he did of the soul-serving throes of man.[119] His imaginative selection among the countless types of these "low kinds" follows the lead of all those forms of primitive joy which we have traced in his types of men and women: here it is the quick-glancing intricate flights of birds or insects, the flitting of quick sandpipers in and out of the marl, or of flies about an old wall; now the fierce contrasts of hue, angularity, and grotesque deformity all at once in Caliban's beasts:-- "Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight;" or it is the massive power of the desert lion, in _The Glove_ or the bright aethereal purity of the butterfly fluttering over the swimmer's head, with its "membraned wings So wonderful, so wide, So sun-suffused;"[120] or the cheery self-dependence of the solitary insect.

"I always love those wild creatures God sets up for themselves," he wrote to Miss Barrett, "so independently, so successfully, with their strange happy minute inch of a candle, as it were, to light them." [121] [Footnote 119: _Donald_.] [Footnote 120: Some of these examples are from Mr Brooke's excellent chapter on Browning's Treatment of Nature.] [Footnote 121: _To E.B.B._, 5th Jan.

1846.] Finally, Browning's joy in soul flowed over also upon the host of lifeless things upon which "soul" itself has in any way been spent.