ough; a-shine,
Thick-steaming, all-alive. Whose shape divine
Quivered i' the farthest rainbow-vapour, glanced
Athwart the flying herons? He advanced,
But warily; though Mincio leaped no more,
Each footfall burst up in the marish-floor
A diamond jet.

And then he somewhat spoils this excellent thing by a piece of detail
too minute for the largeness of the impression. But how clear and how
full of true sentiment it is; and how the image of Palma rainbowed in
the mist, and of Sordello seeing her, fills the landscape with youthful
passion!

Here is the same view in the morning, when Mincio has come down in flood
and filled the marsh:

Mincio, in its place,
Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face,
And, where the mists broke up immense and white
I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light
Out of the crashing of a million stars.

It were well to compare that brilliant piece of light with the grey
water-sunset at Ferrara in the beginning of Book VI.

While eve slow sank
Down the near terrace to the farther bank,
And only one spot left from out the night
Glimmered upon the river opposite--
breadth of watery heaven like a bay,
A sky-like space of water, ray for ray,
And star for star, one richness where they mixed
As this and that wing of an angel, fixed,
Tumultuary splendours folded in
To die.

As usual, Spring enchants him. The second book begins with her coming,
and predicates the coming change in Sordello's soul.

The woods were long austere with snow; at last
Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast
Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes,
Brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods
Our buried year, a witch, grew young again
To placid incantations, and that stain
About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent
With those black pines.

Nor does he omit in _Sordello_ to recall two other favourite aspects of
nature, long since recorded in _Pauline_, the ravine and the woodland
spring. Just as Turner repeated in many pictures of the same place what
he had first observed in it, so Browning recalled in various poems the
first impressions of his youth. He had a curious love for a ravine with
overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, looping itself round
rocks. It occurs in the _Fireside_, it is taken up in his later poems,
and up such a ravin