In _Home Thoughts from Abroad_, it is the exile’s deep homesickness that brings the quick, delicate vision before his eyes: “Oh, to be in England Now that April’s there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now!” But Browning’s touches of nature are not always as happy as this. Often he crowds the details too closely, and fails to blend them with the ground of the picture, so that the tonality is destroyed and the effect is distracting. The foreground is too vivid: the aerial perspective vanishes. There is an impressionism that obscures the reality. As Amiel says: “Under pretense that we want to study it more in detail, we pulverize the statue.” Browning is at his best as a Nature-poet in sky-scapes, like the description of daybreak in _Pippa Passes_, the lunar rainbow in _Christmas Eve_, and the Northern Lights in _Easter Day_; and also in a kind of work which might be called symbolic landscape, where the imaginative vision of nature is made to represent a human experience. A striking example of this work is the scenery of _Childe Roland_, reflecting as in a glass the grotesque horrors of spiritual desolation. There is a passage in _Sordello_ which makes a fertile landscape, sketched in a few swift lines, the symbol of Sordello’s luxuriant nature; and another in Norbert’s speech, in _In a Balcony_, which uses the calm self-abandonment of the world in the tranquil evening light as the type of the sincerity of the heart giving itself up to love. But perhaps as good an illustration as we can find of Browning’s quality as a Nature-poet, is a little bit of mystery called _Meeting at Night_. “The gray sea and the long black land; And the yellow half-moon, large and low; And the startled little waves that leap In fiery ringlets from their sleep, As I gain the cove with pushing prow, And quench its speed in the slushy sand. Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And the blue spirt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!” This is the landscape of the drama.