The next thing to touch on is his drawing of landscape, not now of separate pieces of Nature, but of the whole view of a land seen under a certain aspect of the heavens.  All the poets ought to be able to do this well, and I drew attention to the brief, condensed, yet fan-opening fashion in which Tennyson has done it.  Sometimes the poets describe what they see before them, or have seen; drawing directly from Nature.  Sometimes they invent a wide or varied landscape as a background for a human subject, and arrange and tone it for that purpose.  Shelley did this with great stateliness and subtlety.  Browning does not do it, except, perhaps, in Christmas-Eve, when he prepares the night for the appearance of Christ.  Nevertheless, even in Christmas-Eve, the description of the lunar rainbow is of a thing he has seen, of a not-invented thing, and it is as clear, vivid and natural as it can be; only it is heightened and thrilled through by the expectancy and the thrill in Browning’s soul which the reader feels and which the poet, through his emotion, makes the reader comprehend.  But there is no suggestion that any of this feeling exists in Nature.  The rainbow has no consciousness of the vision to come or of the passion in the poet (as it would have had in Wordsworth), and therefore is painted with an accuracy undimmed by any transference to Nature of the soul of the poet.

I quote the piece; it is a noble specimen of his landscape work: 

    But lo, what think you? suddenly
    The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
    Received at once the full fruition
    Of the moon’s consummate apparition. 
    The black cloud barricade was riven,
    Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
    Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
      North and South and East lay ready
    For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
      Sprang across them and stood steady.

    ’Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect,
    From heaven to heaven extending, perfect
    As the mother-moon’s self, full in face. 
    It rose, distinctly at the base
      With its severe proper colours chorded
    Which still, in the rising, were compressed,
    Until at last they coalesced,
      And supreme the spectral creature lorded
    In a triumph of whitest white,—­
    Above which intervened the night. 
    But above night too, like only the next,
      The second of a wondrous sequence,
      Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
    Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
    Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
    Fainter, flushier and flightier,—­
    Rapture dying along its verge. 
    Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge,
    Whose, from the straining topmost dark,
    On to the key-stone of that arc?

This is only a piece of sky, though I have called it landscape work.  But then the sky is frequently treated alone by Browning; and is always present in power over his landscapes—­it, and the winds in it.  This is natural enough for one who lived so much in Italy, where the scenery of the sky is more superb than that of the earth—­so various, noble and surprising that when Nature plays there, as a poet, her tragedy and comedy, one scarcely takes the trouble of considering the earth.