ort, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its
own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement.

IV.

The great political drama enacted in Italy during the Brownings'
residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of Browning's
imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence
she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife.
The spell of Italian scenery was less easily evaded than the
abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and
colour. And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left palpable
traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which
glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and
rendering the whole relation between Nature and Man. They did not,
indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet. In that very song of
delight in "Italy, my Italy," which tells how the things he best loves
in the world are

"a castle precipice-encurled
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine,"

or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque
blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly
reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are
frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on
the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics
asserting their place beside Nature in the heart of Italy's "old lover."
And in the actual life of the Brownings "Nature" had to be content, as a
rule, with the humbler share. Their chosen abode was not a castle in the
Apennines or an old crumbling house by the southern sea, but an
apartment commanding the crowded streets of Florence; and their
principal absences from it were spent in Rome, in London, or in the yet
more congenial "blaze of Paris." They delighted certainly to escape into
the forest uplands. "Robert and I go out and lose ourselves in the woods
and mountains, and sit by the waterfalls on the starry and moonlit
nights," she wrote from their high perch above Lucca in 1849; but their
adventures in this kind were on the whole like the noon-disport of the
amphibian swimmer in _Fifine_,--they always admitted of an easy retreat
to the _terra firma_ of civilisation,--

"Land the solid and safe
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress."

The Nature Browning knew and lov