The fifty poems of Men and Women, with a few exceptions, fall into three principal groups—­those which interpret various careers or moods or moments of love; those which deal with the fine arts—­painting, poetry, music—­and with these we may class, as kindred in spirit, that poem which has for its subject the passionate pursuit of knowledge, A Grammarian’s Funeral; and thirdly, those which are connected with religious thought and feeling, or present scenes from the history of religions.  Two poems may be called descriptive; both are Italian; both are founded upon a rivalry of contrasts, but one, Up at a Villa—­Down in the City, is made up of humorous observations of Italian city and country life, expressing the mundane tastes and prudent economies of an Italian person of quality; the other, “De Gustibus—­,” which contrasts the happy quietudes of English landscape with the passionate landscape of the South, has romance at the heart of its realism and an ardour of sentiment underlying its pictorial vividness. The Patriot is again Italian, suggested perhaps by the swift revolutions and restorations which Browning had witnessed in Florence, and again it uses with striking effect the principle of contrast; the patriot who a year ago had his intoxicating triumph is now on his way to the scaffold.  His year’s toil for the good of his people has turned into a year’s misdeeds, his life is a failure; but Browning characteristically wrings a victory out of defeat; the crowd at the shambles’ gate may hoot; it is better so, for now the martyr can throw himself upon God, the Paymaster of all his labourers at the close of day.  The most remarkable of these poems, which refuse to take their places in a group, is that forlorn romance of weary and depressed heroism, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.  It is in the main a fantaisie of description; but involved with the descriptive study is a romantic motive.  The external suggestions for the poem were no more than the words from King Lear which form the title, a tower seen in the Carrara mountains, a painting seen in Paris, and the figure of a horse in the tapestry of the drawing-room of Casa Guidi.[64] In his own mind Browning may have put the question:  Of all the feats of knight-errantry which is the hardest?  Not to combat with dragons, or robbers, or salvage men; not to bear down rival champions in a rapture of battle.  Not these, but to cling to a purpose amid all that depresses the senses at a time when the heart within us is also failing; to advance where there is nothing to arouse energy by opposition, and everything without and within to sap the very life of the soul.  Childe Roland is himself hopeless and almost heartless; the plain to which the leering cripple had pointed and over which he rides is created in the utter indigence of nature—­a very nightmare of poverty and mean repulsiveness.  And yet he endures the test, and halts only when he faces the Dark Tower and blows the blast upon his horn.  Browning was wise to carry his romance no further; the one moment of action is enough; it is the breaking of the spell, the waking from the nightmare, and at that point the long-enduring quester may be left.  We are defrauded of nothing by the abrupt conclusion.