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 The silver globules and gold-sparkling grail At bottom-- where the impulse of the water sends up the sand in a cone--a solitary loveliness of Nature that Coleridge and Tennyson have both drawn with a finer pencil than Browning.

The other examples of natural description in _Sordello_, as well as those in _Balaustion_ I shall reserve till I speak of those poems.

As to the dramas, they are wholly employed with humanity.

In them man's soul has so overmastered Browning that they are scarcely diversified half a dozen times by any illustrations derived from Nature.
We now come, with _The Ring and the Book_, to a clear division in his poetry of Nature.

From this time forth Nature decays in his verse.