a sad business.  He has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the flaming walls, to find God in his heaven.  He has not lost the great hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old.  He has not lost his fighting power, nor his cheerful cry that life is before him in the fulness of the world to come.  The Reverie and the Epilogue to Asolando are noble statements of his courage, faith, and joy.  There is nothing sad there, nothing to make us beat the breast.  But there is sadness in this abandonment of the imaginative glory with which once he clothed the world of Nature; and he ought to have retained it.  He would have done so had he not forgotten Nature in anatomising man.

However, he goes on with his undying effort to make the best of things, and though he has lost his rapture in Nature, he has not lost his main theory of man’s life and of the use of the universe.  The end of this Prologue puts it as clearly as it was put in Paracelsus.  Nothing is changed in that.

“At Asolo,” he continues, “my Asolo, when I was young, all natural objects were palpably clothed with fire.  They mastered me, not I them.  Terror was in their beauty.  I was like Moses before the Bush that burned.  I adored the splendour I saw.  Then I was in danger of being content with it; of mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty.  To be satisfied—­that was the peril.  Now I see the natural world as it is, without the rainbow hues the soul bestowed upon it.  Is that well?  In one sense yes.

    And now?  The lambent flame is—­where? 
      Lost from the naked world:  earth, sky,
    Hill, vale, tree, flower—­Italia’s rare
      O’er-running beauty crowds the eye—­
    But flame?—­The Bush is bare.

All is distinct, naked, clear, Nature and nothing else.  Have I lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy?  Have I shut my eyes in pain—­pain for disillusion?  No—­now I know that my home is not in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her.  Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe and love which transcends her: 

    No, for the purged ear apprehends
      Earth’s import, not the eye late dazed: 
    The Voice said “Call my works thy friends! 
      At Nature dost thou shrink amazed? 
    God is it who transcends.”

All Browning is in that way of seeing the matter; but he forgets that he could see it in the same fashion while he still retained the imaginative outlook on the world of Nature.  And the fact is that he did do so in Paracelsus, in Easter-Day, in a host of other poems.  There was then no need for him to reduce to naked fact the glory with which young imagination clothed the world, in order to realise that God transcended Nature.  He had conceived that truth and believed it long ago.  And this explanation, placed here, only tells us that he had lost his ancient love of Nature, and it is sorrowful to understand it of him.