ish or foreign interests. Keats
had no country save the country of Beauty.

At all these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He never displayed
a special patriotism. On the contrary, he is more Italian than English,
and he is more quick to see and sympathise with the national
characteristics of Spain or France or Germany, than he is with those of
England. No insular feeling prevented him from being just to foreigners,
or from having a keen pleasure in writing about them. _Strafford_ is the
only play he wrote on an English subject, and it is rather a study of a
character which might find its place in any aristocracy than of an
English character. Even Pym and Hampden fail to be truly English, and it
would have been difficult for any one but Browning to take their eminent
English elements out of them. _Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_ belong to
Germany and Italy, and there are scarcely three poems in the whole of
the seven numbers of the _Bells and Pomegranates_ which even refer to
England. Italy is there, and chiefly Italy. In _De Gustibus_ he
contrasts himself with his friend who loves England:

Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.

* * *

What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.

"Look for me, old fellow of mine, if I get out of the grave, in a
seaside house in South Italy," and he describes the place and folk he
loves, and ends:

Open my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, "Italy."
Such lovers old are I and she:
So it always was, so shall ever be!

It is a poem written out of his very heart.

And then, the scenery? It is not of our country at all. It is of many
lands, but, above all, it is vividly Italian. There is no more minute
and subtly-felt description of the scenery of a piece of village country
between the mountains and the sea, with all its life, than in the poem
called _The Englishman in Italy_. The very title is an outline of
Browning's position in this matter. We find this English poet in France,
in Syria, in Greece, in Spain, but not in England. We find Rome,
Florence, Venice, Mantua, Verona, and forgotten towns among the
Apennines painted with happy love in verse, but not an English town nor
an English village. The flowers, the hills, the ways of the streams, the