ed was well within sight of humanity,
and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man's
work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or "lamping"
between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the "Alpine
gorge" above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman
Campagna has its tombs--"Rome's ghost since her decease"; the Etrurian
hill--fastnesses have their crowning cities "crowded with culture." He
had always had an alert eye for the elements of human suggestion in
landscape. But his rendering of landscape before the Italian period was
habitually that of a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested
artist, wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fastening upon
every bit of individual detail, and sometimes, as in the admirable
_Englishman in Italy_, recalling Wordsworth's indignant reproof of the
great fellow-artist--Scott--who "made an inventory of Nature's charms."
This hard objective brilliance does not altogether disappear from the
work of his Italian period. But it tends to give way to a strangely
subtle interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion of the
seeing soul. Nature is not more alive, but her life thrills and
palpitates in subtler relation with the life of man. The author of _Men
and Women_ is a greater poet of Nature than the author of the _Lyrics
and Romances_, because he is, also, a greater poet of "Soul"; for his
larger command of soul-life embraces just those moods of spiritual
passion which beget the irradiated and transfigured Nature for which,
since Wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find expression.
Browning's subtler feeling for Nature sprang from his profounder insight
into love. Love was his way of approach, as it was eminently not
Wordsworth's, to the transfigured Nature which Wordsworth first
disclosed. It is habitually lovers who have these visions,--all that was
mystical in Browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to
his ideas of love. To the Two in the Campagna its primeval silence grows
instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,--the joy of illimitable
space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns. To
the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung
over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment
that broke down the bar between soul and soul also breaking down, as it
were, the bar between man and nature:

"The