of the ideal and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual and wealth-seeking society present to us, are restored to us by her quiet, order and beauty.  When he wrote Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, and The Inn Album, Nature had ceased to awaken the poetic passion in him, and his poetry suffered from the loss.  Its interest lies in the narrow realm of intellectual analysis, not in the large realm of tragic or joyous passion.  He became the dissector of corrupt bodies, not the creator of living beings.

Nevertheless, in Fifine at the Fair there are several intercalated illustrations from Nature, all of which are interesting and some beautiful.  The sunset over Sainte-Marie and the lie Noirmoutier, with the birds who sing to the dead, and the coming of the nightwind and the tide, is as largely wrought as the description of the mountain rill—­the “infant of mist and dew,” and its voyage to the sea is minute and delicate.  There is also that magnificent description of a sunset which I have already quoted.  It is drawn to illustrate some remote point in the argument, and is far too magnificent for the thing it illustrates.  Yet how few in this long poem, how remote from Browning’s heart, are these touches of Nature.

Again, in The Inn Album there is a description of an English elm-tree, as an image of a woman who makes marriage life seem perfect, which is interesting because it is the third, and only the third, reference to English scenery in the multitude of Browning’s verses.  The first is in Pauline, the second in that poem, “Oh, to be in England,” and this is the third.  The woman has never ceased to gaze

    On the great elm-tree in the open, posed
    Placidly full in front, smooth hole, broad branch,
    And leafage, one green plenitude of May.
                ... bosomful
    Of lights and shades, murmurs and silences,
    Sun-warmth, dew-coolness, squirrel, bee, bird,
    High, higher, highest, till the blue proclaims
    “Leave Earth, there’s nothing better till next step
    Heavenward!”

This, save in one line, is not felt or expressed with any of that passion which makes what a poet says completely right.

Browning could not stay altogether in this condition, in which, moreover, his humour was also in abeyance; and in his next book, Pacchiarotto, &c., he broke away from these morbid subjects, and, with that recovery, recovered also some of his old love of Nature.  The prologue to that book is poetry; and Nature (though he only describes an old stone wall in Italy covered with straying plants) is interwoven with his sorrow and his love.  Then, all through the book, even in its most fantastic humour, Nature is not altogether neglected for humanity; and the poetry, which Browning seemed to have lost the power to create, has partly