of landscape before the Italian period was habitually that of a brilliant, graphic, but not deeply interested artist, wielding an incisive pencil and an opulent brush, fastening upon every bit of individual detail, and sometimes, as in the admirable Englishman in Italy, recalling Wordsworth’s indignant reproof of the great fellow-artist—­Scott—­who “made an inventory of Nature’s charms.”  This hard objective brilliance does not altogether disappear from the work of his Italian period.  But it tends to give way to a strangely subtle interpenetration of the visible scene with the passion of the seeing soul.  Nature is not more alive, but her life thrills and palpitates in subtler relation with the life of man.  The author of Men and Women is a greater poet of Nature than the author of the Lyrics and Romances, because he is, also, a greater poet of “Soul”; for his larger command of soul-life embraces just those moods of spiritual passion which beget the irradiated and transfigured Nature for which, since Wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find expression.  Browning’s subtler feeling for Nature sprang from his profounder insight into love.  Love was his way of approach, as it was eminently not Wordsworth’s, to the transfigured Nature which Wordsworth first disclosed.  It is habitually lovers who have these visions,—­all that was mystical in Browning’s mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to his ideas of love.  To the Two in the Campagna its primeval silence grows instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,—­the joy of illimitable space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns.  To the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment that broke down the bar between soul and soul also breaking down, as it were, the bar between man and nature: 

     “The forests had done it; there they stood;
        We caught for a moment the powers at play: 
      They had mingled us so, for once and good,
        Their work was done, we might go or stay,
      They relapsed to their ancient mood.”

Such “moments” were, in fact, for Browning as well as for his lovers, rare and fitful exceptions to the general nonchalance of Nature towards human affairs.  The powers did good, as they did evil, “at play”; intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detachment (like Jaques plighting Touchstone and Audrey) in an alien affair of hearts.  A certain eerie playfulness is indeed a recurring trait in Browning’s highly individual feeling about Nature; the uncanny playfulness of a wild creature of boundless might only half intelligible to man, which man contemplates with mingled joy, wonder, and fear.  Joy, when the brown old Earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an autumn morning; wonder, when he watches the “miracles wrought in play” in the teeming life of the Campagna; fear, when, on a hot August