He illustrates with great vigour the way in which Guido destroyed all the home life which clung about him and himself remained dark and vile, by the burning of a nest-like hut in the Campagna, with all its vines and ivy and flowers; till nothing remains but the blackened walls of the malicious tower round which the hut had been built.

He illustrates the sudden event which, breaking in on Caponsacchi’s life, drew out of him his latent power and his inward good, by this vigorous description: 

    As when a thundrous midnight, with black air
    That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell,
    Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed
    Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
    Immensity of sweetness.

And the last illustration, in which the Pope hopes that Guido’s soul may yet be saved by the suddenness of his death, is one of the finest pieces of natural description in Browning, and reads like one of his own memories: 

    I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
    I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
    Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all: 
    But the night’s black was burst through by a blaze—­
    Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
    Through her whole length of mountain visible: 
    There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
    And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 
    So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
    And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.

After The Ring and the Book, poor Nature, as one of Browning’s mistresses, was somewhat neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in humanity, to its smaller problems, like that contained in Fifine at the Fair, to its fantastic impulses, its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its commonplace crimes.  These subjects were redeemed by his steady effort to show that underneath these evil developments of human nature lay immortal good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this underlying godlikeness in man, was the true attitude of the soul towards the false and the stupid in mankind.  This had been his attitude from the beginning.  It differentiates him from Tennyson, who did not maintain that view; and at that point he is a nobler poet than Tennyson.

But he became too much absorbed in the intellectual treatment of these side-issues in human nature.  And I think that he was left unprotected from this or not held back from it by his having almost given up Nature in her relation to man as a subject for his poetry.  To love that great, solemn and beautiful Creature, who even when she seems most merciless retains her glory and loveliness, keeps us from thinking too much on the lower problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements; holds before us infinite grandeur, infinite beauty, infinite order, and suggests and confirms within us eternal aspiration.  Those intimations