One loves a baby-face, with violets there—
Violets instead of laurels in the hair,—
As they were all the little locks could bear"—
with the rasping vigour and strength of sound which point the contrast of the conclusion:—
"Here's John the Smith's rough-hammered head. Great eye,
Gross jaw and griped lips do what granite can
To give you the crown-grasper. What a man!"
One poem of absolutely unique order is the romance of "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." If it were not for certain lines, certain metaphors and images, here and there in his earlier works, we should find in this poem an exception to the rule of Browning's work so singular and startling as to be almost phenomenal. But in passages of Pauline, of Paracelsus, of the lyric written in 1836, and incorporated, more than twenty years later, with James Lee's Wife, we have distinct evidence of a certain reserve, as it were, of romantic sensibility, a certain tendency, which we may consider to have been consciously checked rather than early exhausted, towards the weird and fanciful. In Childe Roland all this latent sensibility receives full and final expression. The poem is very generally supposed to be an allegory, and a number of ingenious interpretations have been suggested, and the "Dark Tower" has been defined as Love, Life, Death and Truth. But, as a matter of fact, Browning, in writing it, had no allegorical intention whatever. It was meant to be, and is, a pure romance. It was suggested by the line from Shakespeare which heads it, and was "built up," in Mrs. Orr's words "of picturesque impressions, which have separately or collectively produced themselves in the author's mind, ... including a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room."[[32]] The poem depicts the last adventure of a knight vowed to the quest of a certain "Dark Tower." The description of his journey across a strange and dreadful country is one of the ghastliest and most vivid in all poetry; ghastly without hope, without alleviation, without a momentary touch of contrast; vivid and ghastly as the lines following:—
"A sudden little river crossed my path