painting of towns, castles and gardens there is
some natural description. Browning endeavours, it is plain, to keep that
within the mediaeval sentiment. But that he should succeed in that was
impossible. The mediaeval folk had little of our specialised sentiment
for landscape, and Browning could not get rid of it.

The modern philosophies of Nature do not, however, appear in _Sordello_
as they did in _Pauline_ or _Paracelsus_. Only once in the whole of
_Sordello_ is Nature conceived as in analogy with man, and Browning says
this in a parenthesis. "Life is in the tempest," he cries, "thought

"Clothes the keen hill-top; mid-day woods are fraught
With fervours":

but, in spite of the mediaeval environment, the modern way of seeing
Nature enters into all his descriptions. They are none the worse for it,
and do not jar too much with the mediaeval _mise-en-scene_. We expect our
modern sentiment, and Sordello himself, being in many ways a modern,
seems to license these descriptions. Most of them also occur when he is
on the canvas, and are a background to his thought. Moreover, they are
not set descriptions; they are flashed out, as it were, in a few lines,
as if they came by chance, and are not pursued into detail. Indeed, they
are not done so much for the love of Nature herself, as for passing
illustrations of Sordello's ways of thought and feeling upon matters
which are not Nature. As such, even in a mediaeval poem, they are
excusable. And vivid they are in colour, in light, in reality. Some I
have already isolated. Here are a few more, just to show his hand. This
is the castle and its scenery, described in Book i.:

In Mantua territory half is slough,
Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks
Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes
With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass
In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was,
Some thirty years before this evening's coil,
One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil,
Goito; just a castle built amid
A few low mountains; firs and larches hid
Their main defiles, and rings of vineyard bound
The rest. Some captured creature in a pound,
Whose artless wonder quite precludes distress,
Secure beside in its own loveliness,
So peered, with airy head, below, above
The castle at its toils, the lapwings love
To glean among at grape time.

And this is the same place from the second book: