Even the hinted landscape-background serves as a mute chorus.

In this "great wild country" of wide forests and pine-clad mountains, the court is the anomaly.
Similarly, in _The Glove_, the lion, so magnificently sketched by Browning, is made to bear out the inner expressiveness of the tale in a way anticipated by no previous teller.

The lion of Schiller's ballad is already assuaged to his circumstances, and enters the arena like a courtier entering a drawing-room.

Browning's lion, still terrible and full of the tameless passion for freedom, bursts in with flashing forehead, like the spirit of the desert of which he dreams: it is the irruption of this mighty embodiment of elemental Nature which wakens in the lady the train of feeling and thought that impel her daring vindication of its claims.
* * * * * Art was far from being as strange to the Browning of 1842-45 as love.
But he seized with a peculiar predilection those types and phases of the Art-world with which love has least to do.

He studies the egoisms of artists, the vanities of connoisseurs; the painter Lutwyche showing "how he can hate"; the bishop of St Praxed's piteously bargaining on his death-bed for the jasper and lapislazuli "which Gandolph shall not choose but see and burst"; the duke of the _Last Duchess_ displaying his wife's portrait as the wonder of his gallery, and unconcernedly disposing of her person.