h night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine.

Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of
emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the
coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with
humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of
her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken
some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does
this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If
that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet,
impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual
view into another land of thought.

There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter. Browning, unlike
Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes. He drew directly from nature.
The landscapes in _Pauline_ and _Sordello_, and in the lyrical poems are
plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from
the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the
rock and the painted shell on the seashore. Even the imaginative
landscape of _Childe Roland_ is a memory, not an invention. I do not say
he would have been incapable of such invented landscape as we find in
_Oenone_ and the _Lotos-Eaters_, but it was not his way to do this.
However, he does it once; but he takes care to show that it is not real
landscape he is drawing, but landscape in a picture. In _Gerard de
Lairesse_, one of the poems in _Parleyings with Certain People_, he sets
himself to rival the "Walk" in Lairesse's _Art of Painting_, and he
invents as a background to mythological or historic scenes, five
landscapes, of dawn, morning, and noon, evening and falling night. They
may be compared with the walk in _Pauline_, and indeed one of them with
its deep pool watched over by the trees recalls his description of a
similar pool in _Pauline_--a lasting impression of his youth, for it is
again used in _Sordello_. These landscapes are some of his most careful
natural description. They begin with the great thunderstorm of dawn in
which Prometheus is seen riveted to his rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus
beside him. Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth
and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then
noon with Lyda and the Satyr--that sad story; then evening charged with