are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the
national struggle which thrills us in _The Italian in England_ and the
third scene of _Pippa Passes_. This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the
Austrian whom Luigi was so eager to assassinate, or any other: whatever
in him belongs to history has been permeated through and through with
the poet's derisive irony; he is despotism stripped of the passionate
conviction which may lend it weight and political significance, reduced
to a kind of sport, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its
own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement.


IV.


The great political drama enacted in Italy during the Brownings'
residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of Browning's
imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence
she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife.
The spell of Italian scenery was less easily evaded than the
abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and
colour. And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left palpable
traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which
glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and
rendering the whole relation between Nature and Man. They did not,
indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet. In that very song of
delight in "Italy, my Italy," which tells how the things he best loves
in the world are

"a castle precipice-encurled
In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine,"