Omnipresent and the Omniscient," utters the Oriental mystic.

It is interesting to know that many of the nature touches were
indirectly due to the poet's solitary rambles, by dawn, sundown, and
"dewy eve," in the wooded districts south of Dulwich, at Hatcham, and
upon Wimbledon Common, whither he was often wont to wander and to
ramble for hours, and where he composed one day the well-known lines
upon Shelley, with many another unrecorded impulse of song. Here, too,
it was, that Carlyle, riding for exercise, was stopped by 'a beautiful
youth,' who introduced himself as one of the philosopher's profoundest
admirers.

It was from the Dulwich wood that, one afternoon in March, he saw a
storm glorified by a double rainbow of extraordinary beauty; a memorable
vision, recorded in an utterance of Luigi to his mother: here too that,
in autumnal dusks, he saw many a crescent moon with "notched and burning
rim." He never forgot the bygone "sunsets and great stars" he saw in
those days of his fervid youth. Browning remarked once that the romance
of his life was in his own soul; and on another occasion I heard him
smilingly add, to some one's vague assertion that in Italy only was
there any romance left, "Ah, well, I should like to include poor old
Camberwell!" Perhaps he was thinking of his lines in "Pippa Passes," of
the days when that masterpiece came ebullient from the fount of his
genius--

"May's warm slow yellow moonlit summer nights--
Gone are they, but I have them in my soul!"

There is all the distinction between "Pippa Passes" and "Sordello" that
there is between the Venus of Milos and a gigantic Theban Sphinx. The
latter is, it is true, proportionate in its vastness; but the symmetry
of mere bulk is not the _symmetria prisca_ of ideal sculpture. I have
already alluded to "Sordello" as a derelict upon the ocean of poetry.
This, indeed, it still seems to me, notwithstanding the well-meaning
suasion of certain admirers of the poem who have hoped "I should do it
justice," thereby meaning that I should eulogise it as a masterpiece. It
is a gigantic effort, of a kind; so is the sustained throe of a
wrestling Titan. That the poem contains much which is beautiful is
undeniable, also that it is surcharged with winsome and profound
thoughts and a multitude of will-o'-the-wisp-like fancies which all
shape towards high thinking.

But it is monotonous as one of the enormous American inland seas to a
lover of the oce