Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
    Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore.

Or we may read the Grammarian’s Funeral, where we leave the city walls and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried.  As we ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse.  Moreover, with a wonderful power, Browning makes us feel the air grow keener, fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier.  That, too, is given by the verse; it is a triumph in Nature-poetry.

Nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of small shut-in spaces of Nature.  There is the garden at the beginning of Paracelsus; the ravine, step by step, in Pauline; the sea-beach, and its little cabinet landscapes, in James Lee’s Wife; the exquisite pictures of the path over the Col di Colma in By the Fireside—­for though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might stand as a small picture by itself.  It is one of Browning’s favourite ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to combine the parts into the whole.  But his way of combination is to touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made.  The verses I quote do this.

    Oh moment, one and infinite! 
      The water slips o’er stock and stone;
    The West is tender, hardly bright;
      How grey at once is the evening grown—­
    One star, its chrysolite!

    We two stood there with never a third,
      But each by each, as each knew well: 
    The sights we saw and the sounds we heard,
      The lights and the shades made up a spell
    Till the trouble grew and stirred.

    Oh, the little more, and how much it is! 
      And the little less, and what worlds away! 
    How a sound shall quicken content to bliss,
      Or a breath suspend the blood’s best play,
    And life be a proof of this!

There are many such miniatures of Nature in Browning’s poetry.  Sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and nobler, when the natural thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity.  I give one instance of this, where the fierce Italian thunderstorm is enhanced by being the messenger of God’s vengeance on guilt.  It is from Pippa Passes.  The heaven’s pillars are over-bowed with heat.  The black-blue canopy descends close on Ottima and Sebald.

    Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
    Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
    And ever and anon some bright white shaft
    Burned thro’ the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
    As if God’s messenger thro’ the close wood-screen
    Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
    Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
    The thunder like a whole sea overhead—­