O’er-festooning every interval,
    As the adventurous spider, making light
    Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height,
    From barbican to battlement:  so flung
    Fantasies forth and in their centre swung
    Our architect,—­the breezy morning fresh
    Above, and merry,—­all his waving mesh
    Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged.

It could not be better done.  The description might stand alone, but better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them subtle as the spider’s threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse, and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth.

Again, in A Bean-stripe:  also Apple-Eating, Ferishtah is asked—­Is life a good or bad thing, white or black?  “Good,” says Ferishtah, “if one keeps moving.  I only move.  When I stop, I may stop in a black place or a white.  But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and colour on them as I move.  It is I who make life good or bad, black or white.  I am like the moon going through vapour”—­and this is the illustration: 

                Mark the flying orb
    Think’st thou the halo, painted still afresh
    At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through
    This was and is and will be evermore
    Coloured in permanence?  The glory swims
    Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight
    By night’s abysmal gloom, unglorified
    Behind as erst before the advancer:  gloom? 
    Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds
    From the abandoned heaven a next surprise. 
    And where’s the gloom now?—­silver-smitten straight,
    One glow and variegation!  So, with me,
    Who move and make,—­myself,—­the black, the white. 
    The good, the bad, of life’s environment.

Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what is in man from that which is within Nature—­hints, prognostics, prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.

There is, however, one human passion which Browning conceives as existing in Nature—­the passion of joy.  But it is a different joy from ours.  It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter even for a brief hour into the rapture of Nature.  That rapture, in Browning’s thought, was derived from the creative thought of God exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of Nature.  And its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into fuller and fuller being.  No poet felt this ecstasy of mere living in Nature more deeply than Browning.  His