But loneliness belongs in a less degree to almost all characters which seriously engaged Browning's imagination. His own intense isolating self-consciousness infused itself into them. Each is a little island kingdom, judged and justified by its own laws, and not entirely intelligible to the foreigner. Hence his persistent use of the dramatic monologue. Every man had his point of view, and his right to state his case. "Where you speak straight out," Browning wrote in effect, as we saw, in one of his earliest letters to his future wife, "I break the white light in the seven colours of men and women"[116]; and each colour had its special truth and worth. His study of character is notoriously occupied with failures of transit between mind and mind. His lovers miss the clue; if they find it, as in _By the Fireside_, the collapse of the barrier walls is told with triumph, and the spell of the forests invoked to explain it. [Footnote 116: _R.B. to E.B.B._, i. 6.] And within the viewless intrenchments thus drawn about character Browning's imagination was prone to reproduce the abrupt and intricate play of line and surface which fascinated his outward eye. "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 "blue breadth of sea without break" 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 "chess-board" of faith diversified by doubt, there a Paracelsus, advancing by complex alternations of "aspiring" and "attainment." 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 "splendid minute and no more" in which she is "saved"; the lover's whole life is summed up in "some moment's product" when "the soul declares itself,"[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.