Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
This is chiefly of the sky, but the description in that gipsy-hearted poem, The Flight of the Duchess, brings before us, at great length, league after league of wide-spreading landscape. It is, first, of the great wild country, cornfield, vineyards, sheep-ranges, open chase, till we arrive at last at the mountains; and climbing up among their pines, dip down into a yet vaster and wilder country, a red, drear, burnt-up plain, over which we are carried for miles:
Till at the last, for a bounding belt,
Comes the salt sand hoar of the great sea-shore.
Or we may read the Grammarian's Funeral, where we leave the city walls and climb the peak on whose topmost ledge he is to be buried. As we ascend the landscape widens; we see it expanding in the verse. Moreover, with a wonderful power, Browning makes us feel the air grow keener, fresher, brighter, more soundless and lonelier. That, too, is given by the verse; it is a triumph in Nature-poetry.
Nor is he less effective in narrow landscape, in the description of small shut-in spaces of Nature. There is the garden at the beginning of Paracelsus; the ravine, step by step, in Pauline; the sea-beach, and its little cabinet landscapes, in James Lee's Wife; the exquisite pictures of the path over the Col di Colma in By the Fireside—for though the whole of the landscape is given, yet each verse almost might stand as a small picture by itself. It is one of Browning's favourite ways of description, to walk slowly through the landscape, describing step by step those parts of it which strike him, and leaving to us to combine the parts into the whole. But his way of combination is to touch the last thing he describes with human love, and to throw back this atmosphere of feeling over all the pictures he has made. The verses I quote do this.
Oh moment, one and infinite!
The water slips o'er stock and stone;
The West is tender, hardly bright;