Or a breath suspend the blood's best play,
And life be a proof of this!
There are many such miniatures of Nature in Browning's poetry. Sometimes, however, the pictures are larger and nobler, when the natural thing described is in itself charged with power, terror or dignity. I give one instance of this, where the fierce Italian thunderstorm is enhanced by being the messenger of God's vengeance on guilt. It is from Pippa Passes. The heaven's pillars are over-bowed with heat. The black-blue canopy descends close on Ottima and Sebald.
Buried in woods we lay, you recollect;
Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood-screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke