But intellectual growth inevitably modified the primitive instinct which it could not uproot; and his sense of Power traverses the whole gamut of dynamic tones, from the lusty "barbaric" joy in the sheer violence of ripping and clashing, to the high-wrought sensibility which throbs in sympathy with the passionate heart-beats of the stars.
[Footnote 93: _Asolando: Reverie._] No one can miss the element of savage energy in Browning.

His associates tell us of his sudden fits of indignation, "which were like thunder-storms"; of his "brutal scorn" for effeminacy, of the "vibration of his loud voice, and his hard fist upon the table," which made short work of cobwebs.[94] The impact of hard resisting things, the jostlings of stubborn matter bent on going its own way, attracted him as the subtle compliances of air appealed to Shelley; and he runs riot in the vocabulary (so abundantly developed in English) which conveys with monosyllabic vigour to the ear these jostlings and impacts.
[Footnote 94: Mr E.Gosse, in _Dict.

of N.B._] "Who were the stragglers, what war did they wage; Whose savage trample thus could pad the dank Soil to a plash ?" he asks in _Childe Roland_,--altogether an instructive example of the ways of Browning's imagination when working, as it so rarely did, on a deliberately fantastic theme.

Hear again with what savage joy his Moon "rips the womb" of the cloud that crosses it; Shelley's Moon, in keeping with the ways of his more tender-hefted universe, merely _broke its woof_.

So the gentle wife of James Lee sees in a vineyard "the vines writhe in rows each impaled on its stake." His "clefts" and "wedges" owe their attraction not only to their intricate angularity but to the violent cleavings and thrustings apart which they result from or produce.