ed, ignoble country
in _Childe Roland_, one of the finest pieces of description in Browning,
wicked, waste and leprous land, makes Nature herself sick with peevish
wrath. "I cannot help my case," she cries. "Nothing but the Judgment's
fire can cure the place."

On the whole, then, for these instances might be supported by many more,
Nature is alive in Browning, but she is not humanised at all, nor at all
at one with us. Tennyson does not make her alive, but he does humanise
her. The other poets of the century do make her alive, but they
harmonise her in one way or another with us. Browning is distinct from
them all in keeping her quite divided from man.

But then he has observed that Nature is expressed in terms of man, and
he naturally, for this conflicts with his general view, desires to
explain this. He does explain it in a passage in _Paracelsus_. Man once
descried, imprints for ever

His presence on all lifeless things; the winds
Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout,
A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh,
Never a senseless gust now man is born.
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts
A secret they assemble to discuss
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
Like grates of hell: the peerless cup afloat
Of the lake-lily is an urn, some nymph
Swims bearing high above her head: no bird
Whistles unseen, but through the gaps above
That let light in upon the gloomy woods,
A shape peeps from the breezy forest-top,
Arch with small puckered mouth and mocking eye.
The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops
With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour.
Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face:
--And this to fill us with regard for Man.

He does not say, as the other poets do, that the pines really commune,
or that the morn has enterprise, or that nymphs and satyrs live in the
woods, but that this _seems_ to be, because man, as the crown of the
natural world, throws back his soul and his soul's life on all the
grades of inferior life which preceded him. It is Browning's
contradiction of any one who thinks that the pathetic fallacy exists in
his poetry.

Nature has then a life of her own, her own joys and sorrows, or rather,
only joy. Browning, indeed, with his intensity of imagination and his
ineradicable desire of life, was not the man to conceive Nature as dead,
as having no co