rock and the eagle-hound of Zeus beside him.  Then the morning is described and the awakening of the earth and Artemis going forth, the huntress-queen and the queen of death; then noon with Lyda and the Satyr—­that sad story; then evening charged with the fate of empires; and then the night, and in it a vast ghost, the ghost of departing glory and beauty.  The descriptions are too long to quote, but far too short to read.  I would that Browning had done more of this excellent work; but that these were created when he was an old man proves that the fire of imagination burnt in him to the end.  They are full of those keen picture-words in which he smites into expression the central point of a landscape.  They realise the glory of light, the force, fierceness, even the quiet of Nature, but they have lost a great deal of the colour of which once he was so lavish.  Nevertheless, the whole scheme of colour in these pictures, with their figures, recalls the pictures of Tintoret.  They have his furia, his black, gold, and sombre purple, his white mist and barred clouds and the thunder-roar in his skies.  Nor are Prometheus and Artemis, and Lyda on her heap of skins in the deep woods, unworthy of the daring hand of the great Venetian.  They seem to stand forth from his canvas.

The poem closes with a charming lyric, half-sad, half-joyful, in which he hails the spring, and which in itself is full of his heart when it was close to the hopefulness he drew from natural beauty.  I quote it to close this chapter: 

    Dance, yellows and whites and reds,
    Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads
    Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds.

    There’s sunshine; scarcely a wind at all
    Disturbs starved grass and daisies small
    On a certain mound by a churchyard wall.

    Daisies and grass be my heart’s bed-fellows,
    On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: 
    Dance you, reds and whites and yellows.

FOOTNOTES: 

[4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon.  But at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could scarcely have visited the north of Palestine.  Indeed, he does not seem all his life long to have been near Hermon.  Browning has transferred to David what he himself had seen in Switzerland.

* * * * *

CHAPTER III

THE TREATMENT OF NATURE

In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other elements in his natural description which demand attention.  The best way to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on which we have already touched.  New points of interest will thus arise; and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume to volume, we may be able—­within this phase of his poetic nature—­to place his poetic development in a clearer light.