It was on the strand at Pornic that he encountered the fateful gipsy whom he calls Fifine.  Arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths of soul in another gipsy child by another shore.  For Browning now, as in the days of the Flight of the Duchess, the gipsy symbolised the life of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation.  The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the wild, who “cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine,” and though disgraced but seem to relish life the more.

The beautiful Prologue—­one of the most original lyrics in the language—­strikes the keynote:—­

     “Sometimes, when the weather
        Is blue, and warm waves tempt
      To free oneself of tether,
        And try a life exempt

      From worldly noise and dust,
        In the sphere which overbrims
      With passion and thought,—­why, just
        Unable to fly, one swims....

      Emancipate through passion
        And thought,—­with sea for sky,
      We substitute, in a fashion,
        For heaven—­poetry.”

It is this “emancipation” from our confinement in the bonds of prose, commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination, which is the true subject of the poem.  But he chooses to convey his meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic characters and situations quite unlike his own.  So his “apology for poetry” becomes an item in Don Juan’s case for the “poetry” of dalliance with light-o’-loves.  Fifine herself acquires new importance; the emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over against her rises the pathetic shadow of the “wife in trouble,” her white fingers pressing Juan’s arm, “ravishingly pure” in her “pale constraint.”  Between these three persons the moving drama is played out, ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser influence.  Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an exquisite creation,—­a wedded sister of Shakespeare’s Hero; Fifine, too, with her strutting bravado and “pose half frank, half fierce,” shrills her discordant note vivaciously enough.  The principal speaker himself is the most complex of Browning’s casuists, a marvellously rich and many-hued piece of portraiture.  This Juan is deeply versed in all the activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends.  Painting and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is an artist and a poet in the lore of Love.