Every rift in the surface catches his eye, and the deeper and more intricate the recess, the more curiously his insinuating fancy explores it.

Sordello's palace is "a maze of corridors,"-- "dusk winding stairs, dim galleries." He probes the depths of the flower-bell; he pries after the warmth and scent that lie within the "loaded curls" of his lady, and irradiates the lizard, or the gnome,[81] in its rock-chamber, the bee in its amber drop,[82] or in its bud,[83] the worm in its clod.

When Keats describes the closed eyes of the sleeping Madeline he is content with the loveliness he sees:-- "And still she slept an _azure-lidded_ sleep." Browning's mining fancy insists on showing us the eye of the dead Porphyria "ensconced" within its eyelid, "like a bee in a bud." A cleft is as seductive to his imagination as a cave to Shelley's.

In a cleft of the wind gashed Apennines he imagines the home he would best love in all the world;[84] in a cleft the pine-tree, symbol of hardy song,[85] strikes precarious root, the ruined eagle finds refuge,[86] and Sibrandus Schaffnaburgensis a watery Inferno.

A like instinct allures him to other images of deep hollow things the recesses of which something else explores and occupies,--the image of the sheath; the image of the cup.