And now one after one seeks his lodging, as star follows star Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!-- In verse vi. the quails, and the crickets, and the jerboa at the door of his sand house, are thrilled into quicker life by David's music. In verse ix. the full joy of living in beasts and men is painted in the midst of landscape after landscape, struck out in single lines,--till all nature seems crowded and simmering with the intense life whose rapture Browning loved so well. These fully reveal his poetic communion with animals. Then, there is a fine passage in verse x. where he describes the loosening of a thick bed of snow from the mountain-side[4]--an occurrence which also drew the interest on Shelley in the _Prometheus_--which illustrates what I have said of Browning's conception of the separate life, as of giant Titans, of the vaster things in Nature. The mountain is alive and lives his life with his own grim joy, and wears his snow like a breastplate, and discharges it when it pleases him. It is only David who thinks that the great creature lives to guard us from the tempests. And Hebron, high on its crested hill, lifts itself out of the morning mist in the same giant fashion, For I wake in the grey dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. Then, at the end of the poem, Browning represents all Nature as full of emotion, as gathered into a fuller life, by David's prophecy of the coming of immortal Love in Christ to man. This sympathy of Nature with humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her. If that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet, impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual view into another land of thought.