eathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.

'Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
As the mother-moon's self, full in face.
It rose, distinctly at the base
With its severe proper colours chorded
Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
Until at last they coalesced,
And supreme the spectral creature lorded
In a triumph of whitest white,--
Above which intervened the night.
But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier and flightier,--
Rapture dying along its verge.
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
On to the key-stone of that arc?

This is only a piece of sky, though I have called it landscape work. But
then the sky is frequently treated alone by Browning; and is always
present in power over his landscapes--it, and the winds in it. This is
natural enough for one who lived so much in Italy, where the scenery of
the sky is more superb than that of the earth--so various, noble and
surprising that when Nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and
comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth.

However, we find an abundance of true landscapes in Browning. They are,
with a few exceptions, Italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth,
that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of
labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to Italy. I select a
few of them:

The morn when first it thunders in March
The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say;
As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
Of the villa gate this warm March day,
No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled
In the valley beneath where, white and wide
Washed by the morning water-gold,
Florence lay out on the mountain side
River and bridge and street and square
Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
Through the live translucent bath of air,
As the sights in a magic crystal ball.

Here is the Roman Campagna and its very sentiment:

The champaign with its endless fleece
Of feathery grasses everywhere!