As usual, Spring enchants him. The second book begins with her coming, and predicates the coming change in Sordello's soul. The woods were long austere with snow; at last Pink leaflets budded on the beech, and fast Larches, scattered through pine-tree solitudes, Brightened, as in the slumbrous heart of the woods Our buried year, a witch, grew young again To placid incantations, and that stain About were from her cauldron, green smoke blent With those black pines. Nor does he omit in _Sordello_ to recall two other favourite aspects of nature, long since recorded in _Pauline_, the ravine and the woodland spring. Just as Turner repeated in many pictures of the same place what he had first observed in it, so Browning recalled in various poems the first impressions of his youth. He had a curious love for a ravine with overhanging trees and a thin thread of water, looping itself round rocks. It occurs in the _Fireside_, it is taken up in his later poems, and up such a ravine Sordello climbs among the pines of Goito: He climbed with (June at deep) some close ravine Mid clatter of its million pebbles sheen, Over which, singing soft, the runnel slipped Elate with rains. Then, in _Sordello_, we come again across the fountain in the grove he draws in _Pauline_, now greatly improved in clearness and word-brightness--a real vision. Fate has given him here a fount Of pure loquacious pearl, the soft tree-tent Guards, with its face of reate and sedge, nor fail The silver globules and gold-sparkling grail At bottom-- where the impulse of the water sends up the sand in a cone--a solitary loveliness of Nature that Coleridge and Tennyson have both drawn with a finer pencil than Browning. The other examples of natural description in _Sordello_, as well as those in _Balaustion_ I shall reserve till I speak of those poems. As to the dramas, they are wholly employed with humanity. In them man's soul has so overmastered Browning that they are scarcely diversified half a dozen times by any illustrations derived from Nature. We now come, with _The Ring and the Book_, to a clear division in his poetry of Nature. From this time forth Nature decays in his verse. Man masters it and drives it out. In _The Ring and the Book_, huge as it is, Nature rarely intrudes; the human passion of the matter is so great that it swallows up all Browning's interest. There is a little forky flashing description of the entrance to the Val d'Ema in Guido's first statement. Caponsacchi is too intensely gathered round the tragedy to use a single illustration from Nature. The only person who does use illustrations from Nature is the only one who is by age, by his life, by the apartness of his high place, capable of sufficient quiet and contemplation to think of Nature at all. This is the Pope.