sly indecisive and embarrassed.]

It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy
whom he calls Fifine. Arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths
of soul in another gipsy child by another shore. For Browning now, as in
the days of the _Flight of the Duchess_, the gipsy symbolised the life
of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation.
The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and
images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of
romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the
wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though
disgraced but seem to relish life the more.

The beautiful _Prologue_--one of the most original lyrics in the
language--strikes the keynote:--

"Sometimes, when the weather
Is blue, and warm waves tempt
To free oneself of tether,
And try a life exempt

From worldly noise and dust,
In the sphere which overbrims
With passion and thought,--why, just
Unable to fly, one swims....

Emancipate through passion
And thought,--with sea for sky,
We substitute, in a fashion,
For heaven--poetry."

It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose,
commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination,
which is the true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey his
meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic
characters and situations quite unlike his own. So his "apology for
poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance
with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new importance; the
emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over
against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her
white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale
constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out,
ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser
influence. Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an
exquisite creation,--a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too,
with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills
her discordant note vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is
the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and
many-hued piece of portraiture. This