However, we find an abundance of true landscapes in Browning.  They are, with a few exceptions, Italian; and they have that grandeur and breadth, that intensity given by blazing colour, that peculiar tint either of labyrinthine or of tragic sentiment which belong to Italy.  I select a few of them: 

    The morn when first it thunders in March
      The eel in the pond gives a leap, they say;
    As I leaned and looked over the aloed arch
      Of the villa gate this warm March day,
    No flash snapped, no dumb thunder rolled
      In the valley beneath where, white and wide
    Washed by the morning water-gold,
      Florence lay out on the mountain side
    River and bridge and street and square
      Lay mine, as much at my beck and call,
    Through the live translucent bath of air,
      As the sights in a magic crystal ball.

Here is the Roman Campagna and its very sentiment: 

    The champaign with its endless fleece
      Of feathery grasses everywhere! 
    Silence and passion, joy and peace,
      An everlasting wash of air—­
    Rome’s ghost since her decease.

And this might be in the same place: 

    Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
      Miles and miles
    On the solitary pastures where our sheep
      Half-asleep
    Tinkle homeward through the twilight—­

This is a crimson sunset over dark and distant woods in autumn: 

                That autumn eve was stilled: 
    A last remains of sunset dimly burned
    O’er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned
    By the wind back upon its bearer’s hand
    In one long flare of crimson; as a brand
    The woods beneath lay black.  A single eye
    From all Verona cared for the soft sky.

And if we desire a sunrise, there is the triumphant beginning of Pippa Passes—­a glorious outburst of light, colour and splendour, impassioned and rushing, the very upsoaring of Apollo’s head behind his furious steeds.  It begins with one word, like a single stroke on the gong of Nature:  it continues till the whole of the overarching vault, and the world below, in vast disclosure, is flooded with an ocean of gold.

      Day! 
      Faster and more fast,
      O’er night’s brim, day boils at last;
      Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim
      Where spurting and suppressed it lay. 
      For not a froth-flake touched the rim
      Of yonder gap in the solid gray
      Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
      But forth one wavelet, then another, curled. 
      Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
      Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
    Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.

This is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted poem, The Flight of the Duchess, brings before us, at great length, league after league of wide-spreading landscape.  It is, first, of the great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines, dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up plain, over which we are carried for miles: