drove him at times into
Impressionism. Good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. It
is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which
makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record.

And colour acted on Browning in the same way. I said he had been
impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before Impressionism was
born in modern art. He was so, because from the beginning he saw things
in colour, more than in light and shade. It is well worth a reader's
while to search him for colour-impressions. I take one, for example,
with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist
would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of
gold and green:

Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And--to break now and then the screen--
Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!

Having, then, this extraordinary power of sight, needing no carefulness
of observation or study, but capable of catching and holding without
trouble all that his eye rested or glanced upon, it is no wonder that
sometimes it amused him to put into verse the doings of a whole day: the
work done in it by men of all classes and the natural objects that
encompassed them; not cataloguing them dryly, but shooting through them,
like rays of light, either his own fancies and thoughts, or the fancies
and thoughts of some typical character whom he invented. This he has
done specially in two poems: _The Englishman in Italy_, where the vast
shell of the Sorrento plain, its sea and mountains, and all the doings
of the peasantry, are detailed with the most intimate delight and
truth. The second of these poems is _Up at a Villa--Down in the City_,
where a farm of the Casentino with its surroundings is contrasted with
the street-life of Florence; and both are described through the
delightful character whom he invents to see them. These poems are
astonishing pieces of intimate, joyful observation of scenery.

Again, there is no poet whose love of animals is greater than
Browning's, and none who has so frequently, so carefully, so vividly
described them. It is amazing, as we go through his work, to realise the
largeness of his range in this matter, from the river-horse to the
lizard, from the eagle to the wren, from the loud singing bee to the
filmy insect in the sunshi