The day Browning climbs Mont Saleve, at the beginning of his poem _La Saisiaz_, after a description of his climb in which he notes a host of minute quaintnesses in rock and flower, and especially little flares of colour, all of them unsentimentalised, he suddenly stands on the mountain-top, and is smitten with the glory of the view.

What does he see?
Himself in Nature?
or Nature herself, like a living being?
Not at all.

He sees what he thinks Nature is there to teach us--not herself, but what is beyond herself.

"I was stationed," he cries, deliberately making this point, "face to face with--Nature ?--rather with Infinitude." We are not in Nature: a part of God aspiring to the whole is there, but not the all of God.

And Nature shows forth her glory, not to keep us with herself, but to send us on to her Source, of whom the universe is but a shred.
The universe of what we call matter in all its forms, which is the definition of Nature as I speak of it here, is one form to Browning of the creative joy of God: we are another form of the same joy.