his feeling for the breadth and
freshness of Nature, his love of flowers and animals, and the way he has
of hitting and emphasising the central point or light of a landscape.
This is easy work, but it is not so easy to capture and define the way
in which his soul, when he was alone, felt with regard to the heavens,
and the earth and all that therein is. Others, like Wordsworth, have
stated this plainly: Browning has nowhere defined his way. What his
intellect held the Natural World to be, in itself; what it meant for
man; the relation in which it stood to God and God to it--these things
are partly plain. They have their attraction for us. It is always
interesting to know what an imaginative genius thinks about such
matters. But it is only a biographical or a half-scientific interest.
But what we want to discover is how Browning, as a poet, felt the world
of Nature. We have to try and catch the unconscious attitude of his soul
when the Universe was at work around him, and he was for the time its
centre--and this is the real difficulty.

Sometimes we imagine we have caught and fixed this elusive thing, but we
finally give up the quest. The best we can do is to try to find the two
or three general thoughts, the most frequently recurring emotions
Browning had when Nature at sundry hours and in diverse manners
displayed before him her beauty, splendour and fire, and seemed to ask
his worship; or again, when she stood apart from him, with the mocking
smile she often wears, and whispered in his ear, "Thou shall pursue me
always, but never find my secret, never grasp my streaming hair." And
both these experiences are to be found in Browning. Nature and he are
sometimes at one, and sometimes at two; but seldom the first, and
generally the second.

The natural world Tennyson describes is for the greater part of it a
reflection of man, or used to heighten man's feeling, or to illustrate
his action, or sentimentalised by memorial associations of humanity, or,
finally, invented as a background for a human subject, and with a
distinct direction towards that subject. Browning, with a few
exceptions, does the exact opposite. His natural world is not made by
our thought, nor does it reflect our passions. His illustrations, drawn
from it, of our actions, break down at certain points, as if the
illustrating material were alien from our nature. Nature, it is true, he
thinks, leads up to man, and therefore has elements in her which are dim