the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the
ghost of departing glory and beauty. The descriptions are too long to
quote, but far too short to read. I would that Browning had done more of
this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man
proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end. They are
full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the
central point of a landscape. They realise the glory of light, the
force, fierceness, even the quiet of Nature, but they have lost a great
deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish. Nevertheless, the
whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls
the pictures of Tintoret. They have his _furia_, his black, gold, and
sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in
his skies. Nor are Prometheus and Artemis, and Lyda on her heap of skins
in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great Venetian.
They seem to stand forth from his canvas.

The poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which
he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it
was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty. I quote it to
close this chapter:

Dance, yellows and whites and reds,
Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads
Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds.

There's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all
Disturbs starved grass and daisies small
On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.

Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows,
On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows:
Dance you, reds and whites and yellows.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon. But
at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could
scarcely have visited the north of Palestine. Indeed, he does not seem
all his life long to have been near Hermon. Browning has transferred to
David what he himself had seen in Switzerland.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III

_THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_

In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a
poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other
elements in his natural description which demand attention. The best way
to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural
descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leav