nscious being of any kind. He did not impute a
personality like ours to Nature, but he saw joy and rapture and play,
even love, moving in everything; and sometimes headded to this delight
she has in herself--and just because the creature was not human--a touch
of elemental unmoral malice, a tricksome sportiveness like that of Puck
in _Midsummer Night's Dream_. The life, then, of Nature had no relation
of its own to our life; but we had some relation to it because we were
conscious that we were its close and its completion.

It follows from this idea of Browning's that he was capable of
describing Nature as she is, without adding any deceiving mist of human
sentiment to his descriptions; and of describing her as accurately and
as vividly as Tennyson, even more vividly, because of his extraordinary
eye for colour. And Nature, so described, is of great interest in
Browning's poetry.

But, then, in any description of Nature, we desire the entrance into
such description of some human feeling so that it may be a more complete
theme for poetry. Browning does this in a different way from Tennyson,
who gives human feelings and thoughts to Nature, or steeps it in human
memories. Browning catches Nature up into himself, and the human element
is not in Nature but in him, in what _he_ thinks and feels, in all that
Nature, quite apart from him, awakens in him. Sometimes he even goes so
far as to toss Nature aside altogether, as unworthy to be thought of in
comparison with humanity. That joy in Nature herself, for her own sake,
which was so distinguishing a mark of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Byron and Keats, is rarely, if ever, found in Browning. This places him
apart. What he loved was man; and save at those times of which I have
spoken, when he conceives Nature as the life and play and wrath and
fancy of huge elemental powers like gods and goddesses, he uses her as a
background only for human life. She is of little importance unless man
be present, and then she is no more than the scenery in a drama. Take
the first two verses of _A Lovers' Quarrel_,

Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.

That is well done--he has liked what he saw. But what is it all, he
thinks; what do I care about it? And he ends the verse:

Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey.

Then take the