24.] [Footnote 63: Mrs Browning's _Letters_, March 1861.] III.
And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for Browning's art.

If his keen objective senses penned his imagination, save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of choice.

The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed, and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed.

It is possible to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told.
He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and plastic form,--feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power, exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic.

In each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul, Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination, controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work.