Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli love which cometh by the hearing of the ear (for Rudel is a sun-worshipper who has never seen his sun) is a pure imaginative devotion to the ideal.  In Count Gismond love is the deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the Perseus and Andromeda 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 incantations, played the part of the gipsy.