m.

"CHILDE ROLAND TO THE DARK TOWER CAME," describes a brave knight
performing a pilgrimage, in which hitherto all who attempted it have
failed. The way through which he struggles is unknown to him; its
features are hideous; a deadly sense of difficulty and danger hangs over
every step; and though Childe Roland's courage is pledged to the
undertaking, the thought of failure at last comes to him as a relief. He
reaches the goal just as failure appears inevitable. The plain has
suddenly closed in; weird and unsightly eminences encompass him on every
side. In one flash he perceives that he is in a trap; in another, that
the tower stands before him; while round it, against the hill-sides, are
ranged the "lost adventurers" who have preceded him--their names and
story clanging loudly and more loudly in his ears--their forms revealed
with ghastly clearness in the last fires of the setting sun.

So far the picture is consistent; but if we look below its surface
discrepancies appear. The Tower is much nearer and more accessible than
Childe Roland has thought; a sinister-looking man, of whom he asked the
way, and who, as he believed, was deceiving him, has really put him on
the right track; and as he describes the country through which he
passes, it becomes clear that half its horrors are created by his own
heated imagination, or by some undefined influence in the place itself.
We are left in doubt whether those who have found failure in this quest,
have not done so through the very act of attainment in it; and when,
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