touch--

Chirrups the contumacious grasshopper.

He has a swift vision of the azure damsel-fly flittering in the wood:

Child of the simmering quiet, there to die.

He sees all the insect population of an old green wall; fancies the
fancies of the crickets and the flies, and the carousing of the cicala
in the trees, and the bee swinging in the chalice of the campanula, and
the wasps pricking the papers round the peaches, and the gnats and early
moths craving their food from God when dawn awakes them, and the
fireflies crawling like lamps through the moss, and the spider,
sprinkled with mottles on an ash-grey back, and building his web on the
edge of tombs. These are but a few things out of this treasure-house of
animal observation and love. It is a love which animates and populates
with life his landscapes.

Many of the points I have attempted here to make are illustrated in
_Saul_. In verse v. the sheep are pictured, with all a shepherd's
delightful affection, coming back at evening to the folding; and, with
David's poetic imagination, compared to the stars following one another
into the meadows of night--

And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!--

In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door
of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In
verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the
midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till
all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose
rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion
with animals. Then, there is a fine passage in verse x. where he
describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the
mountain-side[4]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on Shelley
in the _Prometheus_--which illustrates what I have said of Browning's
conception of the separate life, as of giant Titans, of the vaster
things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own
grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when
it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature
lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested
hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion,

For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves
The dawn struggling wit