returned to him.  That is also the case in La Saisiaz, and I have already spoken of the peculiar elements of the nature-poetry in that work.  In the Dramatic Idyls, of which he was himself fond; and in Jocoseria, there is very little natural description.  The subjects did not allow of it, but yet Nature sometimes glides in, and when she does, thrills the verse into a higher humanity.  In Ferishtah’s Fancies, a book full of flying charm, Nature has her proper place, and in the lyrics which close the stories she is not forgotten; but still there is not the care for her which once ran like a full river of delight through his landscape of human nature.  He loved, indeed, that landscape of mankind the most, the plains and hills and woods of human life; but when he watered it with the great river of Nature his best work was done.  Now, as life grew to a close, that river had too much dried up in his poetry.

It was not that he had not the power to describe Nature if he cared.  But he did not care.  I have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and noon and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which preceded Asolando.  They have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced Nature from humanity, he never could bring them together again.  Nor is this a mere theory.  The Prologue to Asolando supports it.

That sorrowful poem, written, it seems, in the year he died (1889), reveals his position towards Nature when he had lost the power of youth to pour fire on the world.  It is full of his last thinking.  “The poet’s age is sad,” he says.  “In youth his eye lent to everything in the natural world the colours of his own soul, the rainbow glory of imagination: 

    And now a flower is just a flower: 
      Man, bird, beast are but beast, bird, man—­
    Simply themselves, uncinct by dower
      Of dyes which, when life’s day began,
    Round each in glory ran.”

“Ah! what would you have?” he says.  “What is the best:  things draped in colour, as by a lens, or the naked things themselves? truth ablaze, or falsehood’s fancy haze?  I choose the first.”

It is an old man’s effort to make the best of age.  For my part, I do not see that the things are the better for losing the colour the soul gives them.  The things themselves are indifferent.  But as seen by the soul, they are seen in God, and the colour and light which imagination gives them are themselves divine.  Nor is their colour or light only in our imagination, but in themselves also, part of the glory and beauty of God.  A flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast.  And so Browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of Nature as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play.  It is