Her life the eddying of our living soul—­

a possible, even a probable explanation.  But it is not Browning’s view.  There is a celebrated passage in Paracelsus which is quite inconsistent with it.  All Nature, from the beginning, is made to issue forth from the joy God has in making, in embodying his thought in form; and when one form has been made and rejoiced in, in making another still more lovely on the foundation of the last.  So, joy after joy, the world was built, till, in the life of all he has made, God sees his ancient rapture of movement and power, and feels his delight renewed.  I will not quote it here, but only mark that we and the “eddying of our living soul” have nothing to do with the making of this Nature.  It is not even the thoughts of God in us.  God and Nature are alone, and were alone together countless years before we were born.  But man was the close of all.  Nature was built up, through every stage, that man might know himself to be its close—­its seal—­but not it.  It is a separate, unhuman form of God.  Existing thus apart, it does a certain work on us, impressing us from without.  The God in it speaks to the God in us.  It may sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not like a man in a man.  He even goes so far as to impute to Nature, but rarely, such an interest in us; but in reality he rather thinks that we, being Nature’s end, have at such times touched for a moment some of those elements in her which have come down to us—­elements apart from the soul.  And Browning takes care, even when he represents Nature as suddenly at one with us, to keep up the separateness.  The interest spoken of is not a human interest, nor resembles it.  It is like the interest Ariel takes in Prospero and Miranda—­an elemental interest, that of a creature whose nature knows its radical difference from human nature.  If Nature sees us in sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few passages of Browning’s poetry, or seems to know, that we mourn or rejoice, and if she could feel with us she would; but she cannot quite do so.  Like Ariel, she would be grieved with the grief of Gonzalo, were her affections human.  She has then a wild, unhuman, unmoral, unspiritual interest in us, like a being who has an elemental life, but no soul.  But sometimes she is made to go farther, and has the same kind of interest in us which Oberon has in the loves of Helena and Hermia.  When we are loving, and on the verge of such untroubled joy as Nature has always in her being, then she seems able, in Browning’s poetry, actually to work for us, and help us into the fulness of our joy.  In his poem, By the Fireside, he tells how he and the woman he loved were brought to know their love.  It is a passage full of his peculiar view of Nature.  The place where the two lovers stay their footsteps on the hill knows all about them.  “It is silent and aware.”  But it is apart from them also: 

      It has had its scenes, its joys and crimes,
    But that is its own affair.