iterally a part of the emotion. All poetry which
describes in detail, however magnificent, palls on us when persisted in.
"The art of the pen (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward
vision, instead of labouring with a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to
the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted
description. That is why the poets who spring imagination with a word or
a phrase paint lasting pictures. The Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are
in a line, two at most."[10] It is to this, the finest essence of
landscape-painting, that most of Browning's landscapes belong. Yet he
can be as explicit as any one when he sees fit. Look at the poem of _The
Englishman in Italy_. The whole piece is one long description, minute,
careful and elaborated. Perhaps it is worth observing that the
description is addressed to a child.

In the exercise of his power of placing a character or incident in a
sympathetic setting, Browning shows himself, as I have pointed out,
singularly skilful. He never avails himself of the dramatic poet's
licence of vagueness as to surroundings: he sees them himself with
instant and intense clearness, and stamps them as clearly on our brain.
The picture calls up the mood. Here is the opening of one of his very
earliest poems, _Porphyria's Lover_:--

"The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake,
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria."

There, in five lines, is the scene and the mood, and in the sixth line
Porphyria may enter. Take a middle-period poem, _A Serenade at the
Villa_, for an instance of more deliberate description, flashed by the
same fiery art:--

"That was I, you heard last night
When there rose no moon at all,
Nor, to pierce the strained and tight
Tent of heaven, a planet small:
Life was dead and so was light.

Not a twinkle from the fly,
Not a glimmer from the worm.
When the crickets stopped their cry,
When the owls forebore a term,
You heard music; that was I.

Earth turned in her sleep with pain,
Sultrily suspired for proof:
_In at heaven and out again,
Lightning!--where it broke the roof,
Bloodlike, some few drops of rain_.

What they could my words expressed,
O my love, my all, my one!