The first nine lines are the story of a soul subjective as yet and self-absorbed.  The first covert in which it seeks to hide is its own life—­the thoughts and tears and laughter, the hopes and fears of a man.  This is in most men’s lives the first attempt at escape.  The verses here give the inner landscape, the country of a soul’s experience, with wonderful compression.  Then comes the patter of the Hound’s feet, and for the rest we are no longer in the thicket of the inner life, but in the open country of the outer world.  This is but the constantly repeated transition which, as we have already seen, Browning illustrates in his Sordello, the turning-point between the early introspective and the later dramatic periods.

Having gained the open country of the outward and objective world, the inevitable first thought is of love as a refuge from spiritual pursuit.  The story is shortly told in nine lines.  The human and the divine love are rivals here; pagan versus ideal affection.  The hunted heart is not allowed to find refuge or solace in human love.  The man knows that it is Love that follows him:  yet it is the warm, red, earthly passion that he craves for, and the divine pursuer seems cold, exacting, and austere.

Finding no refuge in human love from this “tremendous Lover,” he seeks it next in a kind of imaginative materialism, half-scientific, half-fantastic.  He appeals at “the gold gateways of the stars” and at “the pale ports o’ the moon” for shelter.  He seeks to hide beneath the vague and blossom-woven veil of far sky-spaces, or, in lust of swift motion, “clings to the whistling mane of every wind!” Here is a choice of paganism at its most modern and most impressive.  The cosmic imagination, revelling in the limitless fields of time and space, will surely be sufficient for a man’s idealism, without any insistence upon further definition.  Here are Carlyle’s Eternities and Immensities—­are they not enough?  The answer is that these are but the servants of One mightier than they.  Incorruptible and steadfast in their allegiance, they will neither offer pity nor will they allow peace to him who is not loyal to their Master.  And the hunted soul is stung by a fever of restlessness that chases him back across “the long savannahs of the blue” to earth again, with the recurring patter of the little feet behind him.

Doubling upon the course, the quarry seeks the surest refuge to be found on earth.  Children are still here, and in their simplicity and innocence there is surely a hiding-place that will suffice.  Here is no danger of earthly passion, no Titanic stride among the vast things of the universe.  Are they not the true idealists, the children?  Are they not the authentic guardians of fairyland and of heaven?  Francis Thompson is an authority here, and his love of children has expressed itself in much exquisite prose and poetry.  “Know you what it is to be a child?  It is to be something very different