Oh, those mountains, their infinite movement
          Still moving with you;
    For, ever some new head and heart of them
          Thrusts into view
    To observe the intruder; you see it
          If quickly you turn
    And, before they escape you surprise them. 
        They grudge you should learn
    How the soft plains they look on, lean over
        And love (they pretend)—­
          Cower beneath them.

Total apartness from us!  Nature mocking, surprising us; watching us from a distance, even pleased to see us going to our destruction.  We may remember how the hills look grimly on Childe Roland when he comes to the tower.  The very sunset comes back to see him die: 

                before it left,
    The dying sunset kindled through a cleft: 
    The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay,
    Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.—­

Then, as if they loved to see the death of their quarry, cried, without one touch of sympathy: 

    “Now stab and end the creature—­to the heft!”

And once, so divided from our life is her life, she pities her own case and refuses our pity.  Man cannot help her.  The starved, ignoble country in Childe Roland, one of the finest pieces of description in Browning, wicked, waste and leprous land, makes Nature herself sick with peevish wrath.  “I cannot help my case,” she cries.  “Nothing but the Judgment’s fire can cure the place.”

On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more, Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all at one with us.  Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise her.  The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they harmonise her in one way or another with us.  Browning is distinct from them all in keeping her quite divided from man.

But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to explain this.  He does explain it in a passage in Paracelsus.  Man once descried, imprints for ever

    His presence on all lifeless things; the winds
    Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
    A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh,
    Never a senseless gust now man is born. 
    The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts
    A secret they assemble to discuss
    When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
    Like grates of hell:  the peerless cup afloat
    Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph
    Swims bearing high above her head:  no bird
    Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above
    That let light in upon the gloomy woods,
    A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top,
    Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye. 
    The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
    With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour. 
    Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
    Beneath a warm moon like a happy face: 
    —­And this to fill us with regard for Man.