dauntless, Childe Roland sounds his slughorn and announces that he has
come, we should not know, but that he lives to tell the tale, whether in
doing this he incurs, or is escaping, the general doom. We can connect
no idea of definite pursuit or attainment with a series of facts so
dreamlike and so disjointed: still less extract from it a definite
moral; and we are reduced to taking the poem as a simple work of fancy,
built up of picturesque impressions which have, separately or
collectively, produced themselves in the author's mind.[89]

But these picturesque impressions had, also, their ideal side, which Mr.
Browning as spontaneously reproduced; and we may all recognize under the
semblance of the enchanted country and the adventurous knight, a poetic
vision of life: with its conflicts, contradictions, and mockeries; its
difficulties which give way when they seem most insuperable; its
successes which look like failures, and its failures which look like
success. The thing we may not do is to imagine that an intended lesson
is conveyed by it.


"THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS" is the adventure of a young girl, who was
brought out of a convent to marry a certain Duke. The Duke was
narrow-hearted, pompous, and self-sufficient; the mother who shared his
home, a sickly woman, as ungenial as himself. The young wife, on the
other hand, was a bright, stirring creature, who would have been the
sunshine of a labourer's home. She pined amidst the dreariness and the
formality of her conjugal existence, and seized the first opportunity
of escape from it. A retainer of the Duke's, whose chivalry her position
had aroused, connived at her escape, and tells the story of it.

The Duke had decreed a hunt. Custom prescribed that his wife should