This sympathy of Nature with humanity is so rare a thought in Browning, and so apart from his view of her, that I think he felt its strangeness here; so that he has taken some pains to make us understand that it is not Nature herself who does this, but David, in his uplifted inspiration, who imputes it to her.

If that is not the case, it is at least interesting to find the poet, impassioned by his imagination of the situation, driven beyond his usual view into another land of thought.
There is one more thing to say in closing this chapter.

Browning, unlike Tennyson, did not invent his landscapes.

He drew directly from nature.
The landscapes in _Pauline_ and _Sordello_, and in the lyrical poems are plainly recollections of what he has seen and noted in his memory, from the sweep of the mountainous or oceanic horizon to the lichen on the rock and the painted shell on the seashore.

Even the imaginative landscape of _Childe Roland_ is a memory, not an invention.