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 “stiff blind horse” is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth; in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees “grimace”; the mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower itself is “round and squat,” built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to romance; while round it lie the sportsmen assembled to see the end—­

     “The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
      Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.”

V.

But the scenery of Italy, with all its appeals of picturesque outline and glowing colour, interested Browning less than its painting, sculpture, and music.  “Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art,” Landor declared in one of his stately epitaphs on himself; Browning would, in this sense of the terms at least, have inverted their order.  Casa Guidi windows commanded a view, not only of revolutionary throngs, but of the facade of the Pitti—­a fact of at least equal significance.  From the days of his boyish pilgrimages to the Dulwich Gallery across the Camberwell meadows, he had been an eager student and critic of painting; curious, too, if not yet expert in all the processes and technicalities of the studio.  He judged pictures with the eye of a skilful draughtsman; and two rapid journeys had given him some knowledge of the Italian galleries.  Continuous residence among the chief glories of the brush and chisel did not merely multiply artistic