human
The care-bit, erased, broken-up beauties ever took my taste, says, in _Sordello_, the creator of the pure flame-like soul-beauty of Pompilia and Pippa; very much as the crumbling and blistering of the frescoed walls are no less needful to the charm he feels in his Southern villa than the
gpt
expanding before it. The abruptness, the sharp transitions, the startling and picturesque contrasts which mark so much of the talk of his persons, reflect not merely his agility of mind but his æsthetic relish for the Gothic richness and fretted intricacy that result. The bishop of St Praxed's monologue, for instance, is a sort of live mosaic,--anxious entreaty to his sons, diapered with gloating triumph over old Gandulph. The larger tracts of soul-life are apt in his hands to break up into shifting phases, or to nodulate into sudden crises; here a Blougram, with his
human
of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations of
gpt
and
human
Everywhere in Browning the slow continuities of existence are obscured by vivid moments,--the counterpart of his bursts of sunlight through rifts and chinks. A moment of speech with Shelley stands out, a brilliant handbreadth of time between the blank before and after; a moment of miserable failure blots out the whole after-life of Martin Relph; a moment of heroism stamps once for all the quality of Clive; the whole complex story of Pompilia focuses in the
gpt
in which she is
human
; the lover's whole life is summed up in
gpt
when
human
[117] or utters the upgarnered poetry of its passion; or else, conversely, he looks back on a moment equally indelible, when the single chance of love was missed.
gpt
It once might have been, once only, is the refrain of the lover's regret in Browning, as
human
is the keynote of his triumph. In the contours of event and circumstance, as in those of material objects, he loves jagged angularity, not harmonious curve.
gpt
Our interest's in the dangerous edge of things,
human
The honest thief, the tender murderer, The superstitious atheist;