IV.

The great political drama enacted in Italy during the Brownings’ residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of Browning’s imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife.  The spell of Italian scenery was less easily evaded than the abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and colour.  And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left palpable traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and rendering the whole relation between Nature and Man.  They did not, indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet.  In that very song of delight in “Italy, my Italy,” which tells how the things he best loves in the world are

                “a castle precipice-encurled
      In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine,”

or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics asserting their place beside Nature in the heart of Italy’s “old lover.”  And in the actual life of the Brownings “Nature” had to be content, as a rule, with the humbler share.  Their chosen abode was not a castle in the Apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an apartment commanding the crowded streets of Florence; and their principal absences from it were spent in Rome, in London, or in the yet more congenial “blaze of Paris.”  They delighted certainly to escape into the forest uplands.  “Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit nights,” she wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; but their adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the amphibian swimmer in Fifine,—­they always admitted of an easy retreat to the terra firma of civilisation,—­

     “Land the solid and safe
        To welcome again (confess!)
      When, high and dry, we chafe
        The body, and don the dress.”

The Nature Browning knew and loved was well within sight of humanity, and it was commonly brought nearer by some intrusive vestiges of man’s work; the crescent moon drifting in the purple twilight, or “lamping” between the cypresses, is seen over Fiesole or Samminiato; the “Alpine gorge” above Lucca has its ruined chapel and its mill; the Roman Campagna has its tombs—­“Rome’s ghost since her decease”; the Etrurian hill—­fastnesses have their crowning cities “crowded with culture.”  He had always had an alert eye for the elements of human suggestion in landscape.  But his rendering