I am like the moon going through vapour"-- and this is the illustration: Mark the flying orb Think'st thou the halo, painted still afresh At each new cloud-fleece pierced and passaged through This was and is and will be evermore Coloured in permanence?
The glory swims Girdling the glory-giver, swallowed straight By night's abysmal gloom, unglorified Behind as erst before the advancer: gloom?
Faced by the onward-faring, see, succeeds From the abandoned heaven a next surprise.
And where's the gloom now ?--silver-smitten straight, One glow and variegation! So, with me, Who move and make,--myself,--the black, the white.
The good, the bad, of life's environment.
Fine as these illustrations are, intimate and minute, they are only a few out of a multitude of those comparisons which in Browning image what is in man from that which is within Nature--hints, prognostics, prophecies, as he would call them, of humanity, but not human.
There is, however, one human passion which Browning conceives as existing in Nature--the passion of joy.

But it is a different joy from ours.

It is not dashed by any sorrow, and it is very rarely that we are so freed from pain or from self-contemplation as to be able to enter even for a brief hour into the rapture of Nature.

That rapture, in Browning's thought, was derived from the creative thought of God exercising itself with delight in the incessant making of Nature.

And its manifestation was life, that joyful rush of life in all things into fuller and fuller being.