The Campagna, a plain around the city of Rome, was in ancient times the
seat of many cities; it is now dotted with ruins. "There is a solemnity
and beauty about the Campagna entirely its own. To the reflective mind,
this ghost of old Rome is full of suggestion; its vast, almost limitless
extent as it seems to the traveler; its abundant herbage and floral
wealth in early spring; its desolation, its crumbling monuments, and its
evidences of a vanished civilization, fill the mind with a sweet
sadness, which readily awakens the longing for the infinite spoken of in
the poem." (Berdoe, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 553.)
6. _I touched a thought._ The elusive thought which he fancifully
pursues from point to point in the surrounding landscape finds statement
in lines 34-60. Of these lines Sharp (_Life of Browning_, p. 159) says,
"There is a gulf which not the profoundest search can fathom, which not
the strongest-winged love can overreach: the gulf of individuality. It
is those who have loved most deeply who recognize most acutely this
always pathetic and often terrifying isolation of the soul. None save
the weak can believe in the absolute union of two spirits ... No man, no
poet assuredly, could love as Browning loved, and fail to be aware,
often with vague anger and bitterness, no doubt, of this insuperable
isolation even when spirit seemed to leap to spirit, in the touch of a
kiss, in the evanishing sigh of some one or other exquisite moment."