“I know not too well how I found my way home in the night. 
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right,
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware: 
I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there,
As a runner beset by the populace famished for news—­
Life or death.  The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed
with her crews;
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge:  but I fainted not,
For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest. 
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth—­
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day’s tender birth;
In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills;
In the shuddering forests’ held breath; in the sudden wind-thrills;
In the startled wild beasts that bore off, each with eye sidling
still
Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill
That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid with awe: 
E’en the serpent that slid away silent,—­he felt the new law. 
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers;
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine bowers: 
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low,
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices—­’ E’en so, it is so!’”

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 24:  Modern Painters, Vol.  IV., pp. 377-79.]

[Footnote 25:  It is interesting to remember that Rossetti’s first water-colour was an illustration of this poem, and has for subject and title the line, “Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?”]

[Footnote 26:  James Thomson, the writer of The City of Dreadful Night.]

[Footnote 27:  “Mr Browning is proud to remember,” we are told by Mrs Orr, “that Mazzini informed him he had read this poem to certain of his fellow exiles in England to show how an Englishman could sympathise with them.”—­Handbook 2nd ed., p. 306.]

[Footnote 28:  Some curious particulars are recorded in reference to the composition of this poem. “The Flight of the Duchess 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.  The poem was written in two parts, of which the first was published in Hood’s Magazine, April, 1845, and contained only nine sections.  As Mr Browning was writing it, he was interrupted by the arrival of a friend on some important business, which drove all thoughts of the Duchess and the scheme of her story out of the poet’s head.  But some months after the publication of the first part, when he was staying at Bettisfield Park, in Shropshire, a guest, speaking of early winter, said, ‘The deer had already to break the ice in the pond.’  On this a fancy struck the poet, and, on returning home, he worked it up into the conclusion of The Flight of the Duchess as it now stands.”—­Academy, May 5, 1883.]