About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent
With those black pines.
Nor does he omit in Sordello to recall two other favourite aspects of nature, long since recorded in Pauline, the ravine and the woodland spring. Just as Turner repeated in many pictures of the same place what he had first observed in it, so Browning recalled in various poems the first impressions of his youth. He had a curious love for a ravine with overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, looping itself round rocks. It occurs in the Fireside, it is taken up in his later poems, and up such a ravine Sordello climbs among the pines of Goito:
He climbed with (June at deep) some close ravine
Mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen,
Over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped
Elate with rains.
Then, in Sordello, we come again across the fountain in the grove he draws in Pauline, now greatly improved in clearness and word-brightness—a real vision. Fate has given him here a fount
Of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent
Guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail