er-festooning every interval,
As the adventurous spider, making light
Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
From barbican to battlement: so flung
Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh
Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh
Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.

It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but
better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and
creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and
imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them
subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse,
and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.

Again, in _A Bean-stripe: also Apple-Eating_, Ferishtah is asked--Is
life a good or bad thing, white or black? "Good," says Ferishtah, "if
one keeps moving. I only move. When I stop, I may stop in a black place
or a white. But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is
nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and
colour on them as I move. It is I who make life good or bad, black or
white. I am like the moon going through vapour"--and this is the
illustration:

Mark the flying orb
Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh
At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through
This was and is and will be evermore
Coloured in permanence? The glory swims
Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight
By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified
Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom?
Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds
From the abandoned heaven a next surprise.
And where's the gloom now?--silver-smitten straight,
One glow and variegation! So, with me,
Who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white.
The good, the bad, of life's environment.

Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a
few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what
is in man from that which is within Nature--hints, prognostics,
prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.

There is, however, one human passion which Browning conceives as
existing in Nature--the passion of joy. But it is a different joy from
ours. It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are
so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter
e