allegorical intention whatever.  It was meant to be, and is, a pure romance.  It was suggested by the line from Shakespeare which heads it, and was “built up,” in Mrs. Orr’s words “of picturesque impressions, which have separately or collectively produced themselves in the author’s mind, ... including a tower which Mr. Browning once saw in the Carrara Mountains, a painting which caught his eye years later in Paris; and the figure of a horse in the tapestry in his own drawing-room."[32] The poem depicts the last adventure of a knight vowed to the quest of a certain “Dark Tower.”  The description of his journey across a strange and dreadful country is one of the ghastliest and most vivid in all poetry; ghastly without hope, without alleviation, without a momentary touch of contrast; vivid and ghastly as the lines following:—­

      “A sudden little river crossed my path
        As unexpected as a serpent comes. 
        No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms;
      This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath
      For the fiend’s glowing hoof—­to see the wrath
        Of its black eddy bespate with flakes and spumes.

      So petty yet so spiteful!  All along,
        Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it;
        Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit
      Of mute despair, a suicidal throng: 
      The river which had done them all the wrong,
        Whate’er that was rolled by, deterred no whit.

      Which while I forded,—­good saints, how I feared
        To set my foot upon a dead man’s cheek,
        Each step, or feel the spear I thrust to seek
      For hollows, tangled in his hair or beard! 
      —­It may have been a water-rat I speared
        But, ugh! it sounded like a baby’s shriek.”

The manner of the poem, wholly unlike that of any other poem, may be described by varying Flaubert’s phrase of “epic realism”:  it is romantic realism.  The weird, fantastic and profoundly imaginative picture brought before us with such startling and almost oppressive vividness, is not painted in a style of vague suggestiveness, but in a hard, distinct, definite, realistic way, the realism which results from a faithful record of distorted impressions.  The poet’s imagination is like a flash of lightning which strikes through the darkness, flickering above the earth, and lighting up, point by point, with a momentary and fearful distinctness, the horrors of the landscape.

A large and important group of Men and Women consists of love-poems, or poems dealing, generally in some concrete and dramatic way, sometimes in a purely lyrical manner, with the emotion of love. Love among the Ruins, a masterpiece of an absolutely original kind, is the idyl of a lover’s meeting, in which the emotion is emphasised and developed by the contrast of its surroundings.  The lovers meet in a turret among the ruins of an ancient city, and the moment chosen is immediately before their meeting, when the lover gazes around him, struck into sudden meditation by the vision of the mighty city fallen and of the living might of Love.