Again, when Tennyson took a great gest of war as his subject, he took it exclusively from the history of his own land. No one would know from his writings that high deeds of sacrifice in battle had been done by other nations. He knew of them, but he did not care to write about them. Nor can we trace in his work any care for national struggles or national life beyond this island—except in a few sonnets and short pieces concerning Poland and Montenegro—an isolation of interests which cannot be imputed to any other great poet of the first part of the nineteenth century, excepting Keats, who had no British or foreign interests. Keats had no country save the country of Beauty.
At all these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He never displayed a special patriotism. On the contrary, he is more Italian than English, and he is more quick to see and sympathise with the national characteristics of Spain or France or Germany, than he is with those of England. No insular feeling prevented him from being just to foreigners, or from having a keen pleasure in writing about them. Strafford is the only play he wrote on an English subject, and it is rather a study of a character which might find its place in any aristocracy than of an English character. Even Pym and Hampden fail to be truly English, and it would have been difficult for any one but Browning to take their eminent English elements out of them. Paracelsus and Sordello belong to Germany and Italy, and there are scarcely three poems in the whole of the seven numbers of the Bells and Pomegranates which even refer to England. Italy is there, and chiefly Italy. In De Gustibus he contrasts himself with his friend who loves England:
Your ghost will walk, you lover of trees,
(If our loves remain)
In an English lane
By a cornfield-side a-flutter with poppies.
What I love best in all the world
Is a castle, precipice-encurled,
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine.