Matter with him is not the translucent, tenuous, half-spiritual substance of Shelley, but aggressively massive and opaque, tense with solidity.

And he had in an eminent degree the quick and eager apprehension of space--relations which usually goes with these developed sensibilities of eye and muscle.
There is a hint of it in an early anecdote.

"Why, sir, you are quite a geographer!" he reported his mother to have said to him when, on his very first walk with her, he had given her an elaborate imaginary account of "his houses and estates."[62] But it was only late in life that this acute plasticity and concreteness of his sensibility found its natural outlet.

When in their last winter at Rome (1860-61) he took to clay-modelling, it was with an exultant rapture which for the time thrust poetry into the shade.

"The more tired he has been, and the more his back ached, poor fellow," writes his wife, "the more he has exulted and been happy--no, nothing ever made him so happy before."[63] This was the immense joy of one who has at length found the key after half a lifetime of trying at the lock.
[Footnote 62: Mrs Orr, _Life_, p.