the look of things.  The tale, which is very wittily told, and contains some fine serious lines on the lion, is supposed to be related by Peter Ronsard, in the position of on-looker and moraliser; and the character of the narrator, after the poet’s manner, is brought out by many cunning little touches.  The poem is written almost throughout in double rhymes, in the metre and much in the manner of the Pacchiarotto of thirty years later.  It is worth noticing that in the lines spoken by the lady to Ronsard, and in these alone, the double rhymes are replaced by single ones, thus making a distinct severance between the earnestness of this one passage and the cynical wit of the rest.

The easy mastery of difficult rhyming which we notice in this piece is still more marked in the strange and beautiful romance named The Flight of the Duchess.[28] Not even in Pacchiarotto has Browning so revelled in the most outlandish and seemingly incredible combinations of sound, double and treble rhymes of equal audacity and success.  There is much dramatic appropriateness in the unconventional diction, the story being put into the mouth of a rough old huntsman.  The device of linking fantasy with familiarity is very curious, and the effect is original in the extreme.  The poem is a fusion of many elements, and has all the varying colour of a romantic comedy.  Contrast the intensely picturesque opening landscape, the cleverly minute description of the gipsies and their trades, the humorous naturalness of the Duke’s mediaeval masquerading as related by his unsympathising forester, and, in a higher key the beautiful figure of the young Duchess, and the serene, mystical splendour of the old gipsy’s chant.

Two poems yet remain to be named, and two of the most perfect in the book.  The little parable poem of The Boy and the Angel is one of the most simply beautiful, yet deeply earnest, of Browning’s lyrical poems.  It is a parable in which “the allegorical intent seems to be shed by the story, like a natural perfume from a flower;” and it preaches a sermon on contentment and the doing of God’s will such as no theologian could better. Saul (which I shall mention here, though only the first part, sections one to nine, appeared in Dramatic Romances, sections ten to nineteen being first published in Men and Women) has been by some considered almost or quite Browning’s finest poem.  And indeed it seems to unite almost the whole of his qualities as a poet in perfect fusion.  Music, song, the beauty of nature, the joy of life, the glory and greatness of man, the might of Love, human and divine:  all these are set to an orchestral accompaniment of continuous harmony, now hushed as the wind among the woods at evening, now strong and sonorous as the storm-wind battling with the mountain-pine. Saul is a vision of life, of time and of eternity, told in song as sublime as the vision is steadfast.  The choral symphony of earth and all her voices with which the poem concludes is at once the easiest passage to separate from its context, and (if we may dare, in such a matter, to choose) one, at least, of the very greatest of all.