And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay, when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower;
--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

So it runs; but it is only a momentary memory; and he knew, when he had
done it, and to his great comfort, that he was far away from England.
But when Tennyson writes of Italy--as, for instance, in _Mariana in the
South_--how apart he is! How great is his joy when he gets back to
England!

Then, again, when Browning was touched by the impulse to write about a
great deed in war, he does not choose, like Tennyson, English subjects.
The _Cavalier Tunes_ have no importance as patriot songs. They are mere
experiments. The poem, _How They brought the Good News from Ghent to
Aix_, has twice their vigour. His most intense war-incident is taken
from the history of the French wars under Napoleon. The most ringing and
swiftest poem of personal dash and daring--and at sea, as if he was
tired of England's mistress-ship of the waves--a poem one may set side
by side with the fight of _The Revenge_, is _Hervé Riel_. It is a tale
of a Breton sailor saving the French fleet from the English, with the
sailor's mockery of England embedded in it; and Browning sent the
hundred pounds he got for it to the French, after the siege of Paris.