an
old stone wall in Italy covered with straying plants) is interwoven with
his sorrow and his love. Then, all through the book, even in its most
fantastic humour, Nature is not altogether neglected for humanity; and
the poetry, which Browning seemed to have lost the power to create, has
partly returned to him. That is also the case in _La Saisiaz_, and I
have already spoken of the peculiar elements of the nature-poetry in
that work. In the _Dramatic Idyls_, of which he was himself fond; and in
_Jocoseria_, there is very little natural description. The subjects did
not allow of it, but yet Nature sometimes glides in, and when she does,
thrills the verse into a higher humanity. In _Ferishtah's Fancies_, a
book full of flying charm, Nature has her proper place, and in the
lyrics which close the stories she is not forgotten; but still there is
not the care for her which once ran like a full river of delight through
his landscape of human nature. He loved, indeed, that landscape of
mankind the most, the plains and hills and woods of human life; but when
he watered it with the great river of Nature his best work was done.
Now, as life grew to a close, that river had too much dried up in his
poetry.

It was not that he had not the power to describe Nature if he cared. But
he did not care. I have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and
noon and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which preceded
_Asolando_. They have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene
like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite
unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced Nature from
humanity, he never could bring them together again. Nor is this a mere
theory. The Prologue to _Asolando_ supports it.

That sorrowful poem, written, it seems, in the year he died (1889),
reveals his position towards Nature when he had lost the power of youth
to pour fire on the world. It is full of his last thinking. "The poet's
age is sad," he says. "In youth his eye lent to everything in the
natural world the colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of
imagination:

And now a flower is just a flower:
Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man--
Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
Of dyes which, when life's day began,
Round each in glory ran."

"Ah! what would you have?" he says. "What is the best: things draped in
colour, as by a lens, or the naked things themselves? truth ablaze, or