Both are far removed from the vivid and sympathetic reflection of the national struggle which thrills us in _The Italian in England_ and the third scene of _Pippa Passes_.

This "tyrant" has nothing to do with the Austrian whom Luigi was so eager to assassinate, or any other: whatever in him belongs to history has been permeated through and through with the poet's derisive irony; he is despotism stripped of the passionate conviction which may lend it weight and political significance, reduced to a kind of sport, like the chase of a butterfly, and contemplating its own fantastic tricks with subdued amusement.
IV.
The great political drama enacted in Italy during the Brownings' residence there, thus scarcely stirred the deeper currents of Browning's imagination, any more than, for all the vivid and passionate eloquence she poured forth in its name, it really touched the genius of his wife.
The spell of Italian scenery was less easily evaded than the abstractions of politics by a poet of his keen sensibility to light and colour.

And the years of his Italian sojourn certainly left palpable traces, not only, as is obvious, upon the landscape background which glows behind his human figures, but on his way of conceiving and rendering the whole relation between Nature and Man.

They did not, indeed, make him in any sense a Nature poet.

In that very song of delight in "Italy, my Italy," which tells how the things he best loves in the world are "a castle precipice-encurled In a gash of the wind-grieved Apennine," or some old palazzo, with a pointed cypress to guard it, by the opaque blue breadth of summer sea, the joy in mountain and sea is subtly reinforced at every point by the play of human interest; there are frescoes on the crumbling walls, and a barefooted girl tumbles melons on the pavement with news that the king has been shot at; art and politics asserting their place beside Nature in the heart of Italy's "old lover." And in the actual life of the Brownings "Nature" had to be content, as a rule, with the humbler share.