Dance, yellows and whites and reds, Lead your gay orgy, leaves, stalks, heads Astir with the wind in the tulip-beds. There's sunshine; scarcely a wind at all Disturbs starved grass and daisies small On a certain mound by a churchyard wall. Daisies and grass be my heart's bed-fellows, On the mound wind spares and sunshine mellows: Dance you, reds and whites and yellows. FOOTNOTES: [4] David could only have seen this on the upper slopes of Hermon. But at the time of the poem, when he is the shepherd-youth, he could scarcely have visited the north of Palestine. Indeed, he does not seem all his life long to have been near Hermon. Browning has transferred to David what he himself had seen in Switzerland. * * * * * CHAPTER III _THE TREATMENT OF NATURE_ In the previous chapter, some of the statements made on Browning as a poet of Nature were not sufficiently illustrated; and there are other elements in his natural description which demand attention. The best way to repair these deficiencies will be to take chronologically the natural descriptions in his poems and to comment upon them, leaving out those on which we have already touched. New points of interest will thus arise; and, moreover, taking his natural description as it occurs from volume to volume, we may be able--within this phase of his poetic nature--to place his poetic development in a clearer light. I begin, therefore, with _Pauline_. The descriptions of nature in that poem are more deliberate, more for their own sake, than elsewhere in Browning's poetry. The first of them faintly recalls the manner of Shelley in the _Alastor_, and I have no doubt was influenced by him. The two others, and the more finished, have already escaped from Shelley, and are almost pre-Raphaelite, as much so as Keats, in their detail. Yet all the three are original, not imitative. They suggest Shelley and Keats, and no more, and it is only the manner and not the matter of these poets that they suggest. Browning became instantly original in this as in other modes of poetry. It was characteristic of him from the beginning to the end of his career, to possess within himself his own methods, to draw out of himself new matter and new shapings.