-Shelley in his lonely withdrawn character, Shelley hidden in
the wood of his own thoughts, and, like a spring in that wood, bubbling
upwards into personal poetry--of whom Browning is now thinking. The
image is good, but a better poet would have dwelt more on the fountain
and left the insects and birds alone. It is Shelley also of whom he
thinks--Shelley breaking away from personal poetry to write of the fates
of men, of liberty and love and overthrow of wrong, of the future of
mankind--when he expands his tree-shaded fountain into the river and
follows it to the sea:

And then should find it but the fountain head,
Long lost, of some great river washing towns
And towers, and seeing old woods which will live
But by its banks untrod of human foot.
Which, when the great sun sinks, lie quivering
In light as some thing lieth half of life
Before God's foot, waiting a wondrous change;
Then girt with rocks which seek to turn or stay
Its course in vain, for it does ever spread
Like a sea's arm as it goes rolling on,
Being the pulse of some great country--so
Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!

How good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! How much it needs
thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! And the
faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating
parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the
needless, are faults of which Browning never quite cleared his work. I
do not think he ever cared to rid himself of them.

The next description is not an illustration of man by means of Nature.
It is almost the only set description of Nature, without reference to
man, which occurs in the whole of Browning's work. It is introduced by
his declaration (for in this I think he speaks from himself) of his
power of living in the life of all living things. He does not think of
himself as living in the whole Being of Nature, as Wordsworth or Shelley
might have done. There was a certain matter of factness in him which
prevented his belief in any theory of that kind. But he does transfer
himself into the rejoicing life of the animals and plants, a life which
he knows is akin to his own. And this distinction is true of all his
poetry of Nature. "I can mount with the bird," he says,

Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves
And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,
Or like a fish breathe deep the morning air