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 prophecies and prognostics of us; but she is only connected with us as the road is with the goal it reaches in the end.  She exists independently of us, but yet she exists to suggest to us what we may become, to awaken in us dim longings and desires, to surprise us into confession of our inadequacy, to startle us with perceptions of an infinitude we do not possess as yet but may possess; to make us feel our ignorance, weakness, want of finish; and by partly exhibiting the variety, knowledge, love, power and finish of God, to urge us forward in humble pursuit to the infinite in him.  The day Browning climbs Mont Saleve, at the beginning of his poem La Saisiaz, after a description of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is smitten with the glory of the view.  What does he see?  Himself in Nature? or Nature herself, like a living being?  Not at all.  He sees what he thinks Nature is there to teach us—­not herself, but what is beyond herself.  “I was stationed,” he cries, deliberately making this point, “face to face with—­Nature?—­rather with Infinitude.”  We are not in Nature:  a part of God aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of God.  And Nature shows forth her glory, not to keep us with herself, but to send us on to her Source, of whom the universe is but a shred.

The universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the definition of Nature as I speak of it here, is one form to Browning of the creative joy of God:  we are another form of the same joy.  Nor does Browning conceive, as Wordsworth conceived, of any pre-established harmony between us and the natural world, so that Humanity and Nature can easily converse and live together; so that we can express our thoughts and emotions in terms of Nature; or so that Nature can have, as it were, a human soul.  This is not Browning’s conception.  If he had such a conception he would frequently use in his descriptions what Ruskin calls the “pathetic fallacy,” the use of which is excessively common in Tennyson.  I can scarcely recall more than a very few instances of this in all the poetry of Browning.  Even where it seems to occur, where Nature is spoken of in human terms, it does not really occur.  Take this passage from James Lee’s Wife: