The results of this preoccupation with such subjects and of this manner of dealing with them may be recognized very easily in Browning’s work.
First of all they turned him aside from becoming
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 a great Nature-poet, though he was well fitted to be one. It is not that he loves Nature’s slow and solemn pageant less, but that he loves man’s quick and varied drama more. His landscapes are like scenery for the stage. They accompany the unfolding of the plot and change with it, but they do not influence it. His observation is as keen, as accurate as Wordsworth’s or Tennyson’s, but it is less steady, less patient, less familiar. It is the observation of one who passes through the country but does not stay to grow intimate with it. The forms of nature do not print themselves on his mind; they flash vividly before him, and come and go. Usually it is some intense human feeling that makes the details of the landscape stand out so sharply. In Pippa Passes, it is in the ecstasy of love that Ottima and Sebald notice
“The garden’s silence: even the single bee
Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopped,
And where he hid you only could surmise
By some campanula chalice set a-swing.”
It is the sense of guilty passion that makes the lightning-flashes, burning through the pine-forest, seem like dagger-strokes,—
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“As if God’s messenger through the closed wood screen
Plunged and re-plunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me.”
In Home Thoughts from Abroad, it is the exile’s deep homesickness that brings the quick, delicate vision before his eyes:
“Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England—now!”
But Browning’s touches of nature are not always as happy as this. Often he crowds the details too closely, and fails to blend them with the ground of the picture, so that the tonality is destroyed and the effect is distracting. The foreground is too vivid: the aerial perspective vanishes. There is an impressionism that obscures the reality. As Amiel says: “Under pretense that we want to study it more in detail, we pulverize the statue.”
Browning is at his best as a Nature-poet in sky-scapes,
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 like the description of daybreak in Pippa Passes, the lunar rainbow in Christmas Eve, and the Northern Lights in Easter Day; and also in a kind of work which might be called symbolic landscape, where the imaginative vision of nature is made to represent a human experience. A striking example of this work is the scenery of Childe Roland, reflecting as in a glass the grotesque horrors of spiritual desolation. There is a passage in Sordello which makes a fertile landscape, sketched in a few swift lines, the symbol of Sordello’s luxuriant nature; and another in Norbert’s speech, in In a Balcony, which uses the calm self-abandonment of the world in the tranquil evening light as the type of the sincerity of the heart giving itself up to love. But perhaps as good an illustration as we can find of Browning’s quality as a Nature-poet, is a little bit of mystery called Meeting at Night.
“The gray sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon, large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed in the slushy sand.
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Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And the blue spirt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!”
This is the landscape of the drama.
A second result of Browning’s preoccupation with dramatic psychology is the close concentration and “alleged obscurity” of his style. Here again I evade the critical question whether the obscurity is real, or whether it is only a natural and admirable profundity to which an indolent reviewer has given a bad name. That is a question which Posterity must answer. But for us the fact remains that some of his poetry is hard to read; it demands close attention and strenuous effort; and when we find a piece of it that goes very easily, like The Pied Piper of Hamelin, How They brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, Hervé Riel, or the stirring Cavalier Tunes, we are conscious of missing the sense of strain which we have learned to associate with the reading of Browning.
One reason for this is the predominance of
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 curiosity over harmony in his disposition. He tries to express the inexpressible, to write the unwritable. As Dr. Johnson said of Cowley, he has the habit “of pursuing his thoughts to the last ramifications, by which he loses the grandeur of generality.” Another reason is the fluency, the fertility, the haste of his genius, and his reluctance, or inability, to put the brakes on his own productiveness.
It seems probable that if Browning had been able to write more slowly and carefully he might have written with more lucidity. There was a time when he made a point of turning off a poem a day. It is doubtful whether the story of The Ring and the Book gains in clearness by being told by eleven different persons, all of them inclined to volubility.
Yet Browning’s poetry is not verbose. It is singularly condensed in the matter of language. He seems to have made his most arduous effort in this direction. After Paracelsus had been published and pronounced “unintelligible,” he was inclined to think that there might be some fault of too great terseness in the style. But a letter from Miss Caroline Fox was shown to him, in which that lady, (then
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 very young,) took the opposite view an............