Draws out the excessive virtue of some sheathed
Shut unsuspected flower that hoards and hides
Immensity of sweetness.

And the last illustration, in which the Pope hopes that Guido's soul may
yet be saved by the suddenness of his death, is one of the finest
pieces of natural description in Browning, and reads like one of his own
memories:

I stood at Naples once, a night so dark
I could have scarce conjectured there was earth
Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all:
But the night's black was burst through by a blaze--
Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore,
Through her whole length of mountain visible:
There lay the city thick and plain with spires,
And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.
So may the truth be flashed out by one blow,
And Guido see, one instant, and be saved.

After _The Ring and the Book_, poor Nature, as one of Browning's
mistresses, was somewhat neglected for a time, and he gave himself up to
ugly representations of what was odd or twisted in humanity, to its
smaller problems, like that contained in _Fifine at the Fair_, to its
fantastic impulses, its strange madnesses, its basenesses, even its
commonplace crimes. These subjects were redeemed by his steady effort to
show that underneath these evil developments of human nature lay
immortal good; and that a wise tolerance, based on this underlying
godlikeness in man, was the true attitude of the soul towards the false
and the stupid in mankind. This had been his attitude from the
beginning. It differentiates him from Tennyson, who did not maintain
that view; and at that point he is a nobler poet than Tennyson.

But he became too much absorbed in the intellectual treatment of these
side-issues in human nature. And I think that he was left unprotected
from this or not held back from it by his having almost given up Nature
in her relation to man as a subject for his poetry. To love that great,
solemn and beautiful Creature, who even when she seems most merciless
retains her glory and loveliness, keeps us from thinking too much on the
lower problems of humanity, on its ignobler movements; holds before us
infinite grandeur, infinite beauty, infinite order, and suggests and
confirms within us eternal aspiration. Those intimations of the ideal
and endless perfectness which are dimmed within us by the meaner aspects
of human life, or by the sordid difficulties of thought which a sensual
an