l is distinct, naked, clear, Nature and nothing else. Have I lost
anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my
eyes in pain--pain for disillusion? No--now I know that my home is not
in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with
her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe
and love which transcends her:

No, for the purged ear apprehends
Earth's import, not the eye late dazed:
The Voice said "Call my works thy friends!
At Nature dost thou shrink amazed?
God is it who transcends."

All Browning is in that way of seeing the matter; but he forgets that he
could see it in the same fashion while he still retained the imaginative
outlook on the world of Nature. And the fact is that he did do so in
_Paracelsus_, in _Easter-Day_, in a host of other poems. There was then
no need for him to reduce to naked fact the glory with which young
imagination clothed the world, in order to realise that God transcended
Nature. He had conceived that truth and believed it long ago. And this
explanation, placed here, only tells us that he had lost his ancient
love of Nature, and it is sorrowful to understand it of him.

Finally, the main contentions of this chapter, which are drawn from a
chronological view of Browning's treatment of Nature, are perhaps worth
a summary. The first is that, though the love of Nature was always less
in him than his love of human nature, yet for the first half of his work
it was so interwoven with his human poetry that Nature suggested to him
humanity and humanity Nature. And these two, as subjects for thought and
feeling, were each uplifted and impassioned, illustrated and developed,
by this intercommunion. That was a true and high position. Humanity was
first, Nature second in Browning's poetry, but both were linked together
in a noble marriage; and at that time he wrote his best poetry.

The second thing this chronological treatment of his Nature-poetry
shows, is that his interest in human nature pushed out his love of
Nature, gradually at first, but afterwards more swiftly, till Nature
became almost non-existent in his poetry. With that his work sank down
into intellectual or ethical exercises, in which poetry decayed.

It shows, thirdly, how the love of Nature, returning, but returning with
diminished power, entered again into his love of human nature, and
renewed the passion of his poetry, its singing, and i