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."