as a representation of the depression, the hopelessness, the dullness
and deadness of soul, the doubt and terror even of the man who travels
the last stages of a difficult journey to a long-sought but unknown
goal. His victory consists in the unfaltering persistence of his search.
The "squat tower," when he reaches it, is prosaic and ugly, but finding
it is after all not the essential point. The essential element of his
success is that, encircled by the last temptations to despair, he holds
heart and brain steady, and carries out his quest to its last detail.
(See an article in _The Critic_, May 3, 1886, by Mr. Arlo Bates, in
opposition to any definite allegory. Mr. Nettleship in _Robert Browning_
[p. 89] devotes a chapter to a paraphrase and an allegorical
explanation.)

Mr. Herford (_Life of Browning_, p. 94) calls the poem "a great romantic
legend" and emphasizes its intensity and boldness of invention. He
compares its "horror-world" with that of Coleridge in "The Ancient
Mariner." "What 'The Ancient Mariner' is in the poetry of the mysterious
terrors and splendors of the sea, that 'Childe Roland' is in the poetry
of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged
distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The Childe, like the
Mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery of steadily
gathering menace."

Mr. Chesterton says of the scenery: "It is ... the poetry of the shabby
and hungry aspect of the earth itself. Daring poets who wished to escape
from the conventional gardens and orchards had long been in the habit of
celebrating the poetry of rugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is
not content with this. He insists on celebrating the poetry of mean
landscapes. That sense of scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved,
had never been conveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before."
(_Robert Browning_, p. 159.)

HOW IT STRIKES A CONTEMPORARY

This poem is the story of an obscure poet in the Spanish city of
Valladolid. It brings out his actual life and the townfolk's
misinterpretations of it. Reports multiply upon themselves and take new
meanings till the harmless poet is generally accounted the King's spy
and the real agent of all royal edicts, the town's master, in fact. The
interest which, as a poet, he takes in all manifestations of life is
popularly supposed to be the alertness of a secret agent of the
government. The reams of poetry he writes are transformed into