The Flight of the Duchess is full of the passion of escape from the conventional; and no where is Browning more original or more the poet.  Its manner is exactly right, exactly fitted to the character and condition of the narrator, who is the Duke’s huntsman.  Its metrical movement is excellent, and the changes of that movement are in harmony with the things and feelings described.  It is astonishingly swift, alive, and leaping; and it delays, as a stream, with great charm, when the emotion of the subject is quiet, recollective, or deep.  The descriptions of Nature in the poem are some of the most vivid and true in Browning’s work.  The sketches of animal life—­so natural on the lips of the teller of the story—­are done from the keen observation of a huntsman, and with his love for the animals he has fed, followed and slain.  And, through it all, there breathes the romantic passion—­to be out of the world of custom and commonplace, set free to wander for ever to an unknown goal; to drink the air of adventure and change; not to know to-day what will take place to-morrow, only to know that it will be different; to ride on the top of the wave of life as it runs before the wind; to live with those who live, and are of the same mind; to be loved and to find love the best good in the world; to be the centre of hopes and joys among those who may blame and give pain, but who are never indifferent; to have many troubles, but always to pursue their far-off good; to wring the life out of them, and, at the last, to have a new life, joy and freedom in another and a fairer world.  But let Browning tell the end: 

    So, at the last shall come old age. 
    Decrepit as befits that stage;
    How else would’st thou retire apart
    With the hoarded memories of thy heart,
    And gather all to the very least
    Of the fragments of life’s earlier feast,
    Let fall through eagerness to find
    The crowning dainties yet behind? 
    Ponder on the entire past
    Laid together thus at last,
    When the twilight helps to fuse
    The first fresh with the faded hues. 
    And the outline of the whole
    Grandly fronts for once thy soul. 
    And then as, ’mid the dark, a gleam
    Of yet another morning breaks,
    And, like the hand which ends a dream,
    Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
    Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
    Then——­

Then the romance of life sweeps into the world beyond.  But even in that world the duchess will never settle down to a fixed life.  She will be, like some of us, a child of the wandering tribes of eternity.