special poems of this sort, but everywhere throughout his works. He
writes of painters because he has a kinship with them. "Their pictures
are windows through which he sees into their souls."

It is only natural that a poet with the instincts of a painter should be
capable of superb landscape-painting in verse; and we find in Browning
this power. It is further evident that such a poet, a man who has chosen
poetry instead of painting, must consider the latter art subordinate to
the former, and it is only natural that we should find Browning
subordinating the pictorial to the poetic capacity, and this more
carefully than most other poets. His best landscapes are as brief as
they are brilliant. They are like sabre-strokes, swift, sudden, flashing
the light from their sweep, and striking straight to the heart. And they
are never pushed into prominence for an effect of idle beauty, nor
strewn about in the way of thoughtful or passionate utterance, like
roses in a runner's path. They are subordinated always to the human
interest; blended, fused with it, so that a landscape in a poem of
Browning's is literally a part of the emotion. All poetry which
describes in detail, however magnificent, palls on us when persisted in.
"The art of the pen (we write on darkness) is to rouse the inward
vision, instead of labouring with a Drop-scene brush, as if it were to
the eye; because our flying minds cannot contain a protracted
description. That is why the poets who spring imagination with a word or
a phrase paint lasting pictures. The Shakespearian, the Dantesque, are
in a line, two at most."[10] It is to this, the finest essence of
landscape-painting, that most of Browning's landscapes belong. Yet he
can be as explicit as any one when he sees fit. Look at the poem of _The
Englishman in Italy_. The whole piece is one long description, minute,
careful and elaborated. Perhaps it is worth observing that the
description is addressed to a child.