da myth refined upon and mediaevalised. In _Cristine_ love is the
interpreter of life; a moment of high passion explains, and explains
away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most
real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained. From a
few lines written to illustrate a Venetian picture by Maclise _In a
Gondola_ was evolved. If Browning was not entirely accurate in his
topography of Venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the
depth and opulence of its colour. Here the abandonment to passion is
relieved by the quaint ingenuities and fancies of love that seeks a
momentary refuge from its own excess, and then returns more eagerly upon
itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of
a Venetian painter it glows with colour.

The motives of two narrative poems, _The Glove_ and _The Flight of the
Duchess_, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the
world of convention and the world of reality. In each the insulter of
proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies
between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of
freedom and true love; and in each case the woman makes her glad escape
from what is false to what is true. In restating the incident of the
glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here
used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to
obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation. _The Flight
of the Duchess_ in part took its rise "from a line, 'Following the Queen
of the Gipsies, O!'--the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy,
heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes' day." Some two hundred lines were
given to Hood for his magazine, at a time when Hood needed help, and
death was approaching him. The poem was completed some months later. It
is written, like _The Glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake,
and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like
rhymes. The little Duchess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted
wirework of artificial modes and forms. She is a prisoner who is starved
for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are
irresistible--and that is the whole long poem in brief. Such a small
prisoner, all life and fire, was before many months actually delivered
from her cage in Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning himself, growing in
stature amid his incantatio