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 talk of the woods, the doings of the sea and the clouds in tempest and in peace, the aspects of the sky at noon, at sunrise and sunset, are all foreign, not English.  The one little poem which is of English landscape is written by him in Italy (in a momentary weariness with his daily adoration), and under a green impulse.  Delightful as it is, he would not have remained faithful to it for a day.  Every one knows it, but that we may realise how quick he was to remember and to touch a corner of early Spring in England, on a soft and windy day—­for all the blossoms are scattered—­I quote it here.  It is well to read his sole contribution (except in Pauline and a few scattered illustrations) to the scenery of his own country: