nd are of the same mind; to be loved
and to find love the best good in the world; to be the centre of hopes
and joys among those who may blame and give pain, but who are never
indifferent; to have many troubles, but always to pursue their far-off
good; to wring the life out of them, and, at the last, to have a new
life, joy and freedom in another and a fairer world. But let Browning
tell the end:

So, at the last shall come old age.
Decrepit as befits that stage;
How else would'st thou retire apart
With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
And gather all to the very least
Of the fragments of life's earlier feast,
Let fall through eagerness to find
The crowning dainties yet behind?
Ponder on the entire past
Laid together thus at last,
When the twilight helps to fuse
The first fresh with the faded hues.
And the outline of the whole
Grandly fronts for once thy soul.
And then as, 'mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,
And, like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
Then----

Then the romance of life sweeps into the world beyond. But even in that
world the duchess will never settle down to a fixed life. She will be,
like some of us, a child of the wandering tribes of eternity.

This romantic passion which never dies even in our modern society, is
embodied in the gipsy crone who, in rags and scarcely clinging to life,
suddenly lifts into youth and queenliness, just as in a society, where
romance seems old or dead, it springs into fresh and lovely life. This
is the heart of the poem, and it is made to beat the more quickly by the
wretched attempt of the duke and his mother to bring back the
observances of the Middle Ages without their soul. Nor even then does
Browning leave his motive. The huntsman has heard the gipsy's song; he
has seen the light on his mistress' face as she rode away--the light
which is not from sun or star--and the love of the romantic world is
born in him. He will not leave his master; there his duty lies. "I must
see this fellow his sad life through." But then he will go over the
mountains, after his lady, leaving the graves of his wife and children,
into the unknown, to find her, or news of her, in the land of the
wanderers. And if he never find her, if, after pleasant journeying,
earth cannot give her to his eyes, he will still pursu