To bear the mark of Man's art and toil, to have been hewn or moulded or built, compounded or taken to pieces, by human handiwork, was to acquire a certain romantic allurement for Browning's imagination hardly found in any other poet in the same degree.

The "artificial products" of civilised and cultured life were for him not merely instruments of poetic expression but springs of poetic joy.

No poetry can dispense with images from "artificial" things; Wordsworth himself does not always reject them; with most poets they are commoner, merely because they are better known; but for Browning the impress of "our meddling intellect" added exactly the charm and stimulus which complete exemption from it added for Wordsworth.

His habitual imagery is fetched, not from flowers or clouds or moving winds and waters, but from wine-cups, swords and sheaths, lamps, tesselated pavements, chess-boards, pictures, houses, ships, shops.

Most of these appealed also to other instincts,--to his joy in brilliant colour, abrupt line, intricate surface, or violent emotion.