reated than in _Paracelsus_. But it is never treated for itself alone.
It is made to image or reflect the sentiment of the man who sees it, or
to illustrate a phase of his passion or his thought. But there is a
closer grip upon it than before, a clearer definition, a greater power
of concentrated expression of it, and especially, a fuller use of
colour. Browning paints Nature now like a Venetian; the very shadows of
objects are in colour. This new power was a kind of revelation to him,
and he frequently uses it with a personal joy in its exercise. Things in
Nature blaze in his poetry now and afterwards in gold, purple, the
crimson of blood, in sunlit green and topaz, in radiant blue, in dyes of
earthquake and eclipse. Then, when he has done his landscape thus in
colour, he adds more; he places in its foreground one drop, one eye of
still more flaming colour, to vivify and inflame the whole.

The main landscape of _Sordello_ is the plain and the low pine-clad
hills around Mantua; the half-circle of the deep lagoon which enarms the
battlemented town; and the river Mincio, seen by Sordello when he comes
out of the forest on the hill, as it enters and leaves the lagoon, and
winds, a silver ribbon, through the plain. It is the landscape Vergil
must have loved. A long bridge of more than a hundred arches, with
towers of defence, crosses the marsh from the towered gateway of the
walls to the mainland, and in the midst of the lagoon the deep river
flows fresh and clear with a steady swiftness. Scarcely anywhere in
North Italy is the upper sky more pure at dawn and even, and there is no
view now so mystic in its desolation. Over the lagoon, and puffing from
it, the mists, daily encrimsoned by sunrise and sunset, continually rise
and disperse.

The character and the peculiarities of this landscape Browning has
seized and enshrined in verse. But his descriptions are so arranged as
to reflect certain moments of crisis in the soul of Sordello. He does
not describe this striking landscape for its own sake, but for the sake
of his human subject. The lines I quote below describe noon-day on the
lagoon, seen from the golden woods and black pines; and the vision of
the plain, city and river, suddenly opening out from the wood,
symbolises the soul of Sordello opening out from solitude "into the
veritable business of mankind."

Then wide
Opened the great morass, shot every side
With flashing water through and thr