forests had done it; there they stood;
We caught for a moment the powers at play:
They had mingled us so, for once and good,
Their work was done, we might go or stay,
They relapsed to their ancient mood."

Such "moments" were, in fact, for Browning as well as for his lovers,
rare and fitful exceptions to the general nonchalance of Nature towards
human affairs. The powers did good, as they did evil, "at play";
intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detachment (like Jaques
plighting Touchstone and Audrey) in an alien affair of hearts. A certain
eerie playfulness is indeed a recurring trait in Browning's highly
individual feeling about Nature; the uncanny playfulness of a wild
creature of boundless might only half intelligible to man, which man
contemplates with mingled joy, wonder, and fear. Joy, when the brown old
Earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an autumn morning; wonder, when
he watches the "miracles wrought in play" in the teeming life of the
Campagna; fear, when, on a hot August midnight, Earth tosses stormily on
her couch. And all these notes of feelings are struck, with an intensity
and a boldness of invention which make it unique among his writings, in
the great romantic legend of _Childe Roland_. What the _Ancient Mariner_
is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendours of the sea,
that _Childe Roland_ is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted
desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness
in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an
atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace; the "starved
ignoble" Nature, "peevish and dejected" among her scrub of thistle and
dock, grows malignant; to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little
river with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-trampled mire and
wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous herbage and palsied oak, and
finally the mountains, ignoble as the plain--"mere ugly heights and
heaps," ranged round the deadly den of the Dark Tower. But Browning's
horror-world differs from Coleridge's in the pervading sense that the
powers which control its issues are "at play." The catastrophe is not
the less tragic for that; but the heroic knight is not a culprit who has
provoked the vengeance of his pursuers, but a quarry whose course they
follow with grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap.
The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "s