But how clear and how full of true sentiment it is; and how the image of Palma rainbowed in the mist, and of Sordello seeing her, fills the landscape with youthful passion! Here is the same view in the morning, when Mincio has come down in flood and filled the marsh: Mincio, in its place, Laughed, a broad water, in next morning's face, And, where the mists broke up immense and white I' the steady wind, burned like a spilth of light Out of the crashing of a million stars.
It were well to compare that brilliant piece of light with the grey water-sunset at Ferrara in the beginning of Book VI.
While eve slow sank Down the near terrace to the farther bank, And only one spot left from out the night Glimmered upon the river opposite-- breadth of watery heaven like a bay, A sky-like space of water, ray for ray, And star for star, one richness where they mixed As this and that wing of an angel, fixed, Tumultuary splendours folded in To die.
As usual, Spring enchants him.

The second book begins with her coming, and predicates the coming change in Sordello's soul.
The woods were long austere with snow; at last Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes, Brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods Our buried year, a witch, grew young again To placid incantations, and that stain 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.