In _Ferishtah's Fancies_, a book full of flying charm, Nature has her proper place, and in the lyrics which close the stories she is not forgotten; but still there is not the care for her which once ran like a full river of delight through his landscape of human nature.

He loved, indeed, that landscape of mankind the most, the plains and hills and woods of human life; but when he watered it with the great river of Nature his best work was done.
Now, as life grew to a close, that river had too much dried up in his poetry.
It was not that he had not the power to describe Nature if he cared.

But he did not care.

I have spoken of the invented descriptions of morn and noon and sunset in Gerard de Lairesse in the book which preceded _Asolando_.

They have his trenchant power, words that beat out the scene like strokes on an anvil, but, curiously enough, they are quite unsuffused with human feeling; as if, having once divorced Nature from humanity, he never could bring them together again.