And its silence also is its own.  Those who linger there think that the place longs to speak; its bosom seems to heave with all it knows; but the desire is its own, not ours transferred to it.  But when the two lovers were there, Nature, of her own accord, made up a spell for them and troubled them into speech: 

    A moment after, and hands unseen
      Were hanging the night around us fast;
    But we knew that a bar was broken between
      Life and life:  we were mixed at last
    In spite of the mortal screen.

    The forests had done it; there they stood;
      We caught for a moment the powers at play: 
    They had mingled us so, for once and good,
      Their work was done—­we might go or stay,
    They relapsed to their ancient mood.

Not one of the poets of this century would have thought in that fashion concerning Nature.  Only for a second, man happened to be in harmony with the Powers at play in Nature.  They took the two lovers up for a moment, made them one, and dropped them.  “They relapsed to their ancient mood.”  The line is a whole lesson in Browning’s view of Nature.  But this special interest in us is rare, for we are seldom in the blessed mood of unselfconscious joy and love.  When we are, on the other hand, self-conscious, or in doubt, or out of harmony with love and joy, or anxious for the transient things of the world—­Nature, unsympathetic wholly, mocks and plays with us like a faun.  When Sordello climbs the ravine, thinking of himself as Apollo, the wood, “proud of its observer,” a mocking phrase, “tried surprises on him, stratagems and games.”

Or, our life is too small for her greatness.  When we are unworthy our high lineage, noisy or mean, then we

                quail before a quiet sky
    Or sea, too little for their quietude.

That is a phrase which might fall in with Wordsworth’s theory of Nature, but this which follows from The Englishman in Italy, is only Browning’s.  The man has climbed to the top of Calvano,

        And God’s own profound
    Was above me, and round me the mountains,
        And under, the sea,
    And within me, my heart to bear witness
        What was and shall be.

He is worthy of the glorious sight; full of eternal thoughts.  Wordsworth would then have made the soul of Nature sympathise with his soul.  But Browning makes Nature manifest her apartness from the man.  The mountains know nothing of his soul:  they amuse themselves with him; they are even half angry with him for his intrusion—­a foreigner who dares an entrance into their untrespassed world.  Tennyson could not have thought that way.  It is true the mountains are alive in the poet’s thought, but not with the poet’s life:  nor does he touch them with his sentiment.