Wast thou to me, and art thou to the world!
How good some of that is; how bad it is elsewhere! How much it needs thought, concentration, and yet how vivid also and original! And the faults of it, of grammar, of want of clearness, of irritating parenthesis, of broken threads of thought, of inability to leave out the needless, are faults of which Browning never quite cleared his work. I do not think he ever cared to rid himself of them.
The next description is not an illustration of man by means of Nature. It is almost the only set description of Nature, without reference to man, which occurs in the whole of Browning's work. It is introduced by his declaration (for in this I think he speaks from himself) of his power of living in the life of all living things. He does not think of himself as living in the whole Being of Nature, as Wordsworth or Shelley might have done. There was a certain matter of factness in him which prevented his belief in any theory of that kind. But he does transfer himself into the rejoicing life of the animals and plants, a life which he knows is akin to his own. And this distinction is true of all his poetry of Nature. "I can mount with the bird," he says,
Leaping airily his pyramid of leaves
And twisted boughs of some tall mountain tree,
Or like a fish breathe deep the morning air
In the misty sun-warm water.
This introduces the description of a walk of twenty-four hours through various scenes of natural beauty. It is long and elaborate—the scenery he conceives round the home where he and Pauline are to live. And it is so close, and so much of it is repeated in other forms in his later poetry, that I think it is drawn direct from Nature; that it is here done of set purpose to show his hand in natural description. It begins with night, but soon leaves night for the morning and the noon. Here is a piece of it:
Morning, the rocks and valleys and old woods.
How the sun brightens in the mist, and here,