s altogether from the elemental
life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these passages is
true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of
Browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. I need
not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of
Tennyson. Then Tennyson, like Coleridge--only Tennyson is as vague and
wavering in this belief as Coleridge is firm and clear in it--sometimes
speaks as if Nature did not exist at all apart from our thought:

Her life the eddying of our living soul--

a possible, even a probable explanation. But it is not Browning's view.
There is a celebrated passage in _Paracelsus_ which is quite
inconsistent with it. All Nature, from the beginning, is made to issue
forth from the joy God has in making, in embodying his thought in form;
and when one form has been made and rejoiced in, in making another still
more lovely on the foundation of the last. So, joy after joy, the world
was built, till, in the life of all he has made, God sees his ancient
rapture of movement and power, and feels his delight renewed. I will not
quote it here, but only mark that we and the "eddying of our living
soul" have nothing to do with the making of this Nature. It is not even
the thoughts of God in us. God and Nature are alone, and were alone
together countless years before we were born. But man was the close of
all. Nature was built up, through every stage, that man might know
himself to be its close--its seal--but not it. It is a separate, unhuman
form of God. Existing thus apart, it does a certain work on us,
impressing us from without. The God in it speaks to the God in us. It
may sometimes be said to be interested in us, but not like a man in a
man. He even goes so far as to impute to Nature, but rarely, such an
interest in us; but in reality he rather thinks that we, being Nature's
end, have at such times touched for a moment some of those elements in
her which have come down to us--elements apart from the soul. And
Browning takes care, even when he represents Nature as suddenly at one
with us, to keep up the separateness. The interest spoken of is not a
human interest, nor resembles it. It is like the interest Ariel takes in
Prospero and Miranda--an elemental interest, that of a creature whose
nature knows its radical difference from human nature. If Nature sees us
in sorrow or in joy, she knows, in these few passages of Browning's
poetry