Of the two aspects of Queen Worship, one, Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli, has a mournfully sweet pathos in its lingering lines, and Cristina, not without a touch of vivid passion, contains that personal conviction afterwards enshrined in the lovelier casket of Evelyn Hope. Artemis Prologuizes is Browning’s only experiment in the classic style.  The fragment was meant to form part of a longer work, which was to take up the legend of Hippolytus at the point where Euripides dropped it.  The project was no doubt abandoned for the same wise reasons which led Keats to leave unfinished a lovelier experiment in Hyperion.  It was in this poem that Browning first adopted the Greek spelling of proper names, a practice which he has since carried out, with greater consistency, in his transcripts from AEschylus and Euripides.

Perhaps the finest of the Dramatic Lyrics is the little lyric tragedy, In a Gondola, a poem which could hardly be surpassed in its perfect union or fusion of dramatic intensity with charm and variety of music.  It was suggested by a picture of Maclise, and tells of two Venetian lovers, watched by a certain jealous “Three”; of their brief hour of happiness, and of the sudden vengeance of the Three.  There is a brooding sense of peril over all the blithe and flitting fancies said or sung to one another by the lovers in their gondola; a sense, however, of future rather than of present peril, something of a zest and a piquant pleasure to them.  The sudden tragic ending, anticipated yet unexpected, rounds the whole with a dramatic touch of infallible instinct.  I know nothing with which the poem may be compared:  its method and its magic are alike its own.  We might hear it or fancy it perhaps in one of the Ballades of Chopin, with its entrancing harmonies, its varied and delicate ornamentation, its under-tone of passion and sadness, its storms and gusts of wind-like lashing notes, and the piercing shiver that thrills through its suave sunshine.

It is hardly needful, I hope, to say anything in praise of the last of the Dramatic Lyrics, the incomparable child’s story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin,[20] “a thing of joy for ever,” as it has been well said, “to all with the child’s heart, young and old.”  This poem, probably the most popular of Browning’s poems, was written for William Macready, the son of the actor, and was thrown into the volume at the last moment, for the purpose of filling up the sheet.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 17:  It should be stated here that the three collections of miscellaneous poems published in 1842, 1845 and 1855, and named respectively Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, and Men and Women, were in 1863 broken up and the poems re-distributed.  I shall take the volumes as they originally appeared; a reference to the list of contents of the edition of 1863, given in the Bibliography at the end of this book, will enable the reader to find any poem in its present locality.]