On the weather-side, black, spotted white with the wind.
"Good fortune departs, and disaster's behind"—
Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!
So, not only do we possess all these landscapes but we possess them in colour. They are painted as well as drawn. It is his love of colour which made at least half of the impulse that drove him at times into Impressionism. Good drawing is little to the impressionist painters. It is the sudden glow, splash or flicker of colour that moves them, which makes on them the swift, the momentary impression they wish to record.
And colour acted on Browning in the same way. I said he had been impressionist, when he liked, for forty years before Impressionism was born in modern art. He was so, because from the beginning he saw things in colour, more than in light and shade. It is well worth a reader's while to search him for colour-impressions. I take one, for example, with the black horse flung in at the end exactly in the way an artist would do it who loved a flash of black life midst of a dead expanse of gold and green:
Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And—to break now and then the screen—