[3] Much has been said of the humour of Browning.  But it is rather wit than humour which we perceive.  The gentle pathos which belongs to humour, the pitiful turn of the humourist upon himself, his smile at his own follies and those of mankind, the half light, like that of evening, in which humour dwells, are wanting in Browning.  It is true he has the charity of humour, though not its pathetic power.  But, all the same, he is too keen, too brilliant, too fierce at times for a humourist.  The light in which we see the foolish, fantastic, amusing or contemptible things of life is too bright for humour.  He is a Wit—­with charity—­not a humourist.  As for Tennyson, save in his Lincolnshire poems and Will Waterproof’s Soliloquy, he was strangely devoid either of humour or of wit.

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CHAPTER II

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

It is a difficult task to explain or analyse the treatment of Nature by Browning.  It is easy enough to point out his remarkable love of her colour, his vivid painting of brief landscapes, his minute observation, his flashing way of description, 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.