It is an old man's effort to make the best of age. For my part, I do not see that the things are the better for losing the colour the soul gives them. The things themselves are indifferent. But as seen by the soul, they are seen in God, and the colour and light which imagination gives them are themselves divine. Nor is their colour or light only in our imagination, but in themselves also, part of the glory and beauty of God. A flower is never only a flower, or a beast a beast. And so Browning would have said in the days when he was still a lover of Nature as well as of man, when he was still a faithful soldier in the army of imagination, a poet more than a philosopher at play. It is a sad business. He has not lost his eagerness to advance, to climb beyond the flaming walls, to find God in his heaven. He has not lost the great hopes with which he began, nor the ideals he nursed of old. He has not lost his fighting power, nor his cheerful cry that life is before him in the fulness of the world to come. The _Rêverie_ and the _Epilogue_ to _Asolando_ are noble statements of his courage, faith, and joy. There is nothing sad there, nothing to make us beat the breast. But there is sadness in this abandonment of the imaginative glory with which once he clothed the world of Nature; and he ought to have retained it. He would have done so had he not forgotten Nature in anatomising man. However, he goes on with his undying effort to make the best of things, and though he has lost his rapture in Nature, he has not lost his main theory of man's life and of the use of the universe. The end of this _Prologue_ puts it as clearly as it was put in _Paracelsus_. Nothing is changed in that. "At Asolo," he continues, "my Asolo, when I was young, all natural objects were palpably clothed with fire. They mastered me, not I them. Terror was in their beauty. I was like Moses before the Bush that burned. I adored the splendour I saw. Then I was in danger of being content with it; of mistaking the finite for the infinite beauty. To be satisfied--that was the peril. Now I see the natural world as it is, without the rainbow hues the soul bestowed upon it. Is that well? In one sense yes. And now? The lambent flame is--where? Lost from the naked world: earth, sky, Hill, vale, tree, flower--Italia's rare O'er-running beauty crowds the eye-- But flame?--The Bush is bare. All is distinct, naked, clear, Nature and nothing else. Have I lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my eyes in pain--pain for disillusion? No--now I know that my home is not in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe and love which transcends her: No, for the purged ear apprehends Earth's import, not the eye late dazed: The Voice said "Call my works thy friends! At Nature dost thou shrink amazed? God is it who transcends."