Even after the great sorrow of his life, the mood of _Prospice_, though it may have underlain all his other moods, did not suppress or transform them; he "lived in the world and loved earth's way," and however assured that this earth is not his only sphere, did not wish "the wings unfurled That sleep in the worm, they say." Whatever affinities Browning may have with the mystic or the symbolist for whom the whole sense-world is but the sign of spiritual realities, it is plain that this way of envisaging existence found little support in the character of his senses.

He had not the brooding eye, beneath which, as it gazes, loveliness becomes far lovelier, but an organ aggressively alert, minutely inquisitive, circumstantially exact, which perceived the bearings of things, and explored their intricacies, noted how the mortar was tempered in the walls and if any struck a woman or beat a horse, but was as little prone to transfigure these or other things with the glamour of mysterious suggestion as the eye of Peter Bell himself.

He lacked the stranger and subtler sensibilities of eye and ear, to which Nature poetry of the nineteenth century owes so much.
His senses were efficient servants to an active brain, not magicians flinging dazzling spells into the air before him or mysterious music across his path.

By a curious and not unimportant peculiarity he could see a remote horizon clearly with one eye, and read the finest print in twilight with the other; but he could not, like Wordsworth, hear the "sound of alien melancholy" given out from the mountains before a storm.
The implicit realism of his eye and ear was fortified by acute tactual and muscular sensibilities.

He makes us vividly aware of surface and texture, of space, solidity, shape.