For as on edifice of cloud i' the grey and green Of evening,--built about some glory of the west, To barricade the sun's departure,--manifest, He plays, pre-eminently gold, gilds vapour, crag and crest Which bend in rapt suspense above the act and deed They cluster round and keep their very own, nor heed The world at watch; while we, breathlessly at the base O' the castellated bulk, note momently the mace Of night fall here, fall there, bring change with every blow, Alike to sharpened shaft and broadened portico I' the structure; heights and depths, beneath the leaden stress Crumble and melt and mix together, coalesce, Reform, but sadder still, subdued yet more and more By every fresh defeat, till wearied eyes need pore No longer on the dull impoverished decadence Of all that pomp of pile in towering evidence So lately. _Fifine, cvi_. It is plain that Browning separates us altogether from the elemental life of these gigantic beings. And what is true of these passages is true, with one or two exceptions, of all the natural descriptions of Browning in which the pathetic fallacy seems to be used by him. I need not say how extraordinarily apart this method of his is from that of Tennyson. Then Tennyson, like Coleridge--only Tennyson is as vague and wavering in this belief as Coleridge is firm and clear in it--sometimes speaks as if Nature did not exist at all apart from our thought: Her life the eddying of our living soul--