e Sordello climbs among the pines of Goito:

He climbed with (June at deep) some close ravine
Mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen,
Over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped
Elate with rains.

Then, in _Sordello_, we come again across the fountain in the grove he
draws in _Pauline_, now greatly improved in clearness and
word-brightness--a real vision. Fate has given him here a fount

Of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent
Guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail
The silver globules and gold-sparkling grail
At bottom--

where the impulse of the water sends up the sand in a cone--a solitary
loveliness of Nature that Coleridge and Tennyson have both drawn with a
finer pencil than Browning. The other examples of natural description in
_Sordello_, as well as those in _Balaustion_ I shall reserve till I
speak of those poems. As to the dramas, they are wholly employed with
humanity. In them man's soul has so overmastered Browning that they are
scarcely diversified half a dozen times by any illustrations derived
from Nature.

We now come, with _The Ring and the Book_, to a clear division in his
poetry of Nature. From this time forth Nature decays in his verse. Man
masters it and drives it out. In _The Ring and the Book_, huge as it is,
Nature rarely intrudes; the human passion of the matter is so great that
it swallows up all Browning's interest. There is a little forky flashing
description of the entrance to the Val d'Ema in Guido's first statement.
Caponsacchi is too intensely gathered round the tragedy to use a single
illustration from Nature. The only person who does use illustrations
from Nature is the only one who is by age, by his life, by the apartness
of his high place, capable of sufficient quiet and contemplation to
think of Nature at all. This is the Pope.

He illustrates with great vigour the way in which Guido destroyed all
the home life which clung about him and himself remained dark and vile,
by the burning of a nest-like hut in the Campagna, with all its vines
and ivy and flowers; till nothing remains but the blackened walls of the
malicious tower round which the hut had been built.

He illustrates the sudden event which, breaking in on Caponsacchi's
life, drew out of him his latent power and his inward good, by this
vigorous description:

As when a thundrous midnight, with black air
That burns, rain-drops that blister, breaks a spell,