The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet.
The smile, the mirth, the listening, might be said to impute humanity to Nature: but the Earth and the Sea are plainly quite distinct from us. These are great giant creatures who are not ourselves: Titans who live with one another and not with us; and the terms of our humanity are used to make us aware of their separate existence from us, not of their being images only of our mind.
Another passage will illustrate the same habit of Browning's mind with nature. He describes, for the purpose of his general thought, in Fifine at the Fair, the course of a stormy sunset. The clouds, the sun, the night, act like men, and are written of in terms of humanity. But this is only to explain matters to us; the mighty creatures themselves have nothing to do with us. They live their own vast, indifferent life; and we see, like spectators, what they are doing, and do not understand what we see. The sunset seems to him the last act of an ever-recurring drama, in which the clouds barricade the Sun against his rest, and he plays with their opposition like the huge giant he is; till Night, with her terrific mace, angry with them for preventing the Sun from repose, repose which will make her Queen of the world, beats them into ruin. This is the passage:
For as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green
Of evening,—built about some glory of the west,
To barricade the sun's departure,—manifest,
He plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag and crest
Which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed
They cluster round and keep their very own, nor heed
The world at watch; while we, breathlessly at the base