O'er-festooning every interval, As the adventurous spider, making light Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, From barbican to battlement: so flung Fantasies forth and in their centre swung Our architect,--the breezy morning fresh Above, and merry,--all his waving mesh Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged. It could not be better done. The description might stand alone, but better than it is the image it gives of the joy, fancifulness and creativeness of a young poet, making his web of thoughts and imaginations, swinging in their centre like the spider; all of them subtle as the spider's threads, obeying every passing wind of impulse, and gemmed with the dew and sunlight of youth. Again, in _A Bean-stripe: also Apple-Eating_, Ferishtah is asked--Is life a good or bad thing, white or black? "Good," says Ferishtah, "if one keeps moving. I only move. When I stop, I may stop in a black place or a white. But everything around me is motionless as regards me, and is nothing more than stuff which tests my power of throwing light and colour on them as I move. It is I who make life good or bad, black or white. I am like the moon going through vapour"--and this is the illustration: Mark the flying orb Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through This was and is and will be evermore Coloured in permanence? The glory swims Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom? Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds From the abandoned heaven a next surprise. And where's the gloom now?--silver-smitten straight, One glow and variegation! So, with me, Who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white. The good, the bad, of life's environment. Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what is in man from that which is within Nature--hints, prognostics, prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.