Mr. Browning reverts to his defence of the nude in the description of a picture—­exhibited last year at the Grosvenor Gallery—­the subject of which he offers to Furini for treatment in the manner described.[129]

With GERARD DE LAIRESSE is a critical reminiscence of the unreal and mythological in art, and its immediate subject a Belgian painter, born at Liege, but who nourished at Amsterdam in the second half of the seventeenth century.  De Lairesse was a man of varied artistic culture as well as versatile skill; but he was saturated with the pseudo-classical spirit of the later period of the renaissance; and landscape itself scarcely existed for him but as a setting for mythological incident or a subject for embellishment by it.  This is curiously apparent in a treatise on the Art of Painting, which he composed, and, by a form of dictation, also illustrated, when at the age of fifty he had lost his sight.  An English version of this fell into Mr. Browning’s hands while he was yet a child, and the deep and, at the time, delightful impression which it made upon him is the motive of the present poem.  Foremost in his memory is an imaginary “Walk,"[130] in which the exercise of fancy which the author practises and, Mr. Browning tells us, enjoins, is strikingly displayed by his “conjecturing” Phaeton’s tomb from the evidence of a carved thunderbolt in an empty sepulchre, and the remains of the “Chariot of the Sun” from a piece of broken wheel and some similar fragment buried in the adjoining ground.

The remembrance converts itself into a question:  the poet’s fancy no longer peoples the earth with gods and goddesses; has his insight become less vivid? has the poetic spirit gone back?  The answer is unwavering; retrogression is not in the creative plan.  The poet does not go back.  He is still as of yore a seer; he has only changed in this, that his chosen visions are of the soul; their objects are no longer visible unrealities, but the realities which are unseen.  He can still, if he pleases, evoke those as these, and Mr. Browning proceeds to show it by calling up a series of dissolving views representing another “walk.”

A majestic and varied landscape unfolds before us in the changing lights of a long summer’s day; and at each appropriate artistic moment becomes the background of a mythological, idyllic, or semi-mythical scene.  In the early dawn we see Prometheus amidst departing thunders chained to his rock:[131] the glutted, yet still hungering vulture cowering beside him; in the dews of morning, Artemis triumphant in her double character of huntress-queen and goddess of sudden death; in the heats of noon, Lyda and the Satyr, enacting the pathetic story of his passion and her indifference;[132] in the lengthening shadows, the approaching shock of the armies of Darius and Alexander;[133]—­in the falling night, a dim, silent, deprecating figure:  in other words, a ghost.