not ringing with this early
note, but having in them a wafting scent of the Provencal spirit. One is
the song sung by Pippa when she passes the room where Jules and Phene
are talking--the song of Kate, the Queen. The other is the cry Rudel,
the great troubadour, sent out of his heart to the Lady of Tripoli whom
he never saw, but loved. The subject is romantic, but that, I think, is
all the romance in it. It is not Rudel who speaks but Browning. It is
not the twelfth but the nineteenth century which has made all that
analysis and over-worked illustration.

There remain, on this matter, _Childe Roland_ and the _Flight of the
Duchess_. I believe that _Childe Roland_ emerged, all of a sudden and to
Browning's surprise, out of the pure imagination, like the Sea-born
Queen; that Browning did not conceive it beforehand; that he had no
intention in it, no reason for writing it, and no didactic or moral aim
in it. It was not even born of his will. Nor does he seem to be
acquainted with the old story on the subject which took a ballad form
in Northern England. The impulse to write it was suddenly awakened in
him by that line out of an old song the Fool quotes in _King Lear_.
There is another tag of a song in _Lear_ which stirs a host of images in
the imagination; and out of which some poet might create a romantic
lyric:

Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind.

But it does not produce so concrete a set of images as _Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower came_. Browning has made that his own, and what he has
done is almost romantic. Almost romantic, I say, because the
peculiarities of Browning's personal genius appear too strongly in
_Childe Roland_ for pure romantic story, in which the idiosyncrasy of
the poet, the personal element of his fancy, are never dominant. The
scenery, the images, the conduct of the tales of romance, are, on
account of their long passage through the popular mind, impersonal.

Moreover, Browning's poem is too much in the vague. The romantic tales
are clear in outline; this is not. But the elements in the original
story entered, as it were of their own accord, into Browning. There are
several curious, unconscious reversions to folk-lore which have crept
into his work like living things which, seeing Browning engaged on a
story of theirs, entered into it as into a house of their own, and
without his knowledge. The wretched cripple who points the way; the
blind and wicked horse; the accursed stream