"tresses curled
Into a sumptuous swell of gold, and wound
About her like a glory! even the ground
Was bright as with spilt sunbeams;"
and the girl in Love among the Ruins, and the "dear dead women" of Venice. His love of fire and of the imagery of flame has one of its sources in his love of light. Verona emerges from the gloom of the past as "a darkness kindling at the core." He sees the "pink perfection of the cyclamen," the "rose bloom o'er the summit's front of stone." And, like most painters of the glow of light, he throws a peculiar intensity into his glooms. When he paints a dark night, as in Pan and Luna, the blackness is a solid jelly-like thing that can be cut. And even night itself falls short of the pitchy gloom that precedes the Eastern vision, breaking in despair "against the soul of blackness there," as the gloom of Saul's tent discovers within it "a something more black than the blackness," the sustaining tent-pole, and then Saul himself "gigantic and blackest of all."
[64] "I never grow tired of sunrises," he wrote in a letter, recently published, to Aubrey de Vere, in 1851 (A. de Vere: A Memoir, by Wilfrid Ward).
[65] Two Poets of Croisic.
But mostly the foil is a vivid, even strident, contrast. He sees the "old June weather" blue above, and the
"great opaque
Blue breadth of sea without a break"
under the walls of the seaside palazzo in Southern Italy, "where the baked cicala dies of drouth"; and [the] blue lilies about the harp of golden-haired David; and Solomon gold-robed in the blue abyss of his cedar house, "like the centre spike of gold which burns deep in the blue-bell's womb";[66] and the "gaze of Apollo" through the gloom of Verona woods;[67] he sees the American pampas—"miles and miles of gold and green," "where the sunflowers blow in a solid glow," with a horse—"coal-black"—careering across it; and his swarthy Ethiop uses the yellow poison-wattles of a lizard to divine with.[68] If he imagines the "hairy-gold orbs" of the sorb-fruit, they must be ensconced in "black glossy myrtle-berries," foils in texture as in hue;[69] and he neglects the mellow harmonies of autumnal decay in order to paint the leaf which is like a splash of blood intense, abrupt, across the flame of a golden shield.[70] He makes the most of every hint of contrast he finds, and delights in images which accentuate the rigour of antithesis; Cleon's mingled black and white slaves remind him of a tesselated pavement, and Blougram's fluctuating faith and doubt of a chess-board. And when, long after the tragic break-up of his Italian home, he reverted in thought to Miss Blagden's Florentine garden, the one impression that sifted itself out in his tell-tale memory was of spots of colour and light upon dark backgrounds,—"the herbs in red flower, and the butterflies on the top of the wall under the olive-trees."[71]
[66] Popularity.
[67] Sordello.
[68] Ibid.
[69] Englishman in Italy.
[70] By the Fireside.
[71] Mrs Orr, Life, p. 258.
Browning's colouring is thus strikingly expressive of the build of his mind, as sketched above. It is the colouring of a realist in so far as it is always caught from life, and never fantastic or mythical. But it is chosen with an instinctive and peremptory bias of eye and imagination—the index of a mind impatient of indistinct confusions and placid harmony, avid of intensity, decision, and conflict.