“Thou art so close by me, the roughest swell
      Of wind in the tree-tops hides not the panting
      Of thy soft breasts -----”

(where, by the way, should be noticed the subtle correspondence between the conceptive and the expressional rhythm) we have a hint of that superb scene in “Pippa Passes,” where, on a sinister night of July, a night of spiritual storm as well as of aerial tempest, Ottima and Sebald lie amid the lightning-searcht forest, with “the thunder like a whole sea overhead.”  Again, in the lovely Turneresque, or rather Shelleyan picture of morning, over “the rocks, and valleys, and old woods,” with the high boughs swinging in the wind above the sun-brightened mists, and the golden-coloured spray of the cataract amid the broken rocks, whereover the wild hawks fly to and fro, there is at least a suggestion, an outline, of the truly magnificent burst of morning music in the poet’s penultimate volume, beginning—­

     “But morning’s laugh sets all the crags alight
      Above the baffled tempest:  tree and tree
      Stir themselves from the stupor of the night,
      And every strangled branch resumes its right
      To breathe, shakes loose dark’s clinging dregs, waves free
      In dripping glory.  Prone the runnels plunge,
      While earth, distent with moisture like a sponge,
      Smokes up, and leaves each plant its gem to see,
      Each grass-blade’s glory-glitter,” etc.

Who that has ever read “Pauline” will forget the masterful poetry descriptive of the lover’s wild-wood retreat, the exquisite lines beginning “Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, tangled, old and green”?  There is indeed a new, an unmistakable voice here.

“And tongues of bank go shelving in the waters,
Where the pale-throated snake reclines his head,
And old grey stones lie making eddies there;
The wild mice cross them dry-shod"....

What lovelier image in modern poetry than that depictive of the forest-pool in depths of savage woodlands, unvisited but by the shadows of passing clouds,—­

                     “the trees bend
      O’er it as wild men watch a sleeping girl.”

How the passionate sexual emotion, always deep and true in Browning, finds lovely utterance in the lines where Pauline’s lover speaks of the blood in her lips pulsing like a living thing, while her neck is as “marble misted o’er with love-breath,” and

“... her delicious eyes as clear as heaven,
When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist,
And clouds float white in the sun like broods of swans.”

In the quotations I have made, and in others that might be selected (e.g., “Her fresh eyes, and soft hair, and lips which bleed like a mountain berry"), it is easy to note how intimate an observer of nature the youthful poet was, and with what conscious but not obtrusive art he brings forward his new and striking imagery.  Browning, indeed, is the poet of new symbols.