The author of _Men and Women_ is a greater poet of Nature than the author of the _Lyrics and Romances_, because he is, also, a greater poet of "Soul"; for his larger command of soul-life embraces just those moods of spiritual passion which beget the irradiated and transfigured Nature for which, since Wordsworth, poetry has continually striven to find expression.
Browning's subtler feeling for Nature sprang from his profounder insight into love.

Love was his way of approach, as it was eminently not Wordsworth's, to the transfigured Nature which Wordsworth first disclosed.

It is habitually lovers who have these visions,--all that was mystical in Browning's mind attaching itself, in fact, in some way to his ideas of love.

To the Two in the Campagna its primeval silence grows instinct with passion, and its peace with joy,--the joy of illimitable space and freedom, alluring yet mocking the finite heart that yearns.

To the lovers of the Alpine gorge the old woods, heaped and dim, that hung over their troth-plighting, mysteriously drew them together; the moment that broke down the bar between soul and soul also breaking down, as it were, the bar between man and nature: "The forests had done it; there they stood; We caught for a moment the powers at play: They had mingled us so, for once and good, Their work was done, we might go or stay, They relapsed to their ancient mood." Such "moments" were, in fact, for Browning as well as for his lovers, rare and fitful exceptions to the general nonchalance of Nature towards human affairs.