, or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could
feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so. Like Ariel, she
would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her affections human.
She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like
a being who has an elemental life, but no soul. But sometimes she is
made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon
has in the loves of Helena and Hermia. When we are loving, and on the
verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she
seems able, in Browning's poetry, actually to work for us, and help us
into the fulness of our joy. In his poem, _By the Fireside_, he tells
how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love. It is a
passage full of his peculiar view of Nature. The place where the two
lovers stay their footsteps on the hill knows all about them. "It is
silent and aware." But it is apart from them also:

It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
But that is its own affair.

And its silence also is its own. Those who linger there think that the
place longs to speak; its bosom seems to heave with all it knows; but
the desire is its own, not ours transferred to it. But when the two
lovers were there, Nature, of her own accord, made up a spell for them
and troubled them into speech:

A moment after, and hands unseen
Were hanging the night around us fast;
But we knew that a bar was broken between
Life and life: we were mixed at last
In spite of the mortal screen.

The forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done--we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood.

Not one of the poets of this century would have thought in that fashion
concerning Nature. Only for a second, man happened to be in harmony with
the Powers at play in Nature. They took the two lovers up for a moment,
made them one, and dropped them. "They relapsed to their ancient mood."
The line is a whole lesson in Browning's view of Nature. But this
special interest in us is rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of
unselfconscious joy and love. When we are, on the other hand,
self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony with love and joy, or
anxious for the transient things of the world--Nature, unsympathetic
wholly, mocks and plays with us