its office-bearers for a time; then in a moment it resumes all authority
into its own hands, resolves of a sudden all that is complex into the
singleness of joy or pain, fuses all that is manifold into the unity of
its own life and being. His dramatic method requires that each single
faculty should be seen in the environment of a character, and that its
operations should be clothed more or less in circumstance. And since
love has its ingenuities, its fine-spun and far-flung threads of
association, its occult symbolisms, Browning knows how to press into the
service of the central emotion objects and incidents and imagery which
may seem remote or curious or fantastic or trivial or even grotesque.
In _Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli_ love which cometh by the hearing of
the ear (for Rudel is a sun-worshipper who has never seen his sun) is a
pure imaginative devotion to the ideal. In _Count Gismond_ love is the
deliverer; the motive of the poem is essentially that of the Perseus and
Andromeda myth refined upon and mediaevalised. In _Cristine_ love is the
interpreter of life; a moment of high passion explains, and explains
away, all else that would obscure the vision of what is best and most
real in this our world and in the worlds that are yet unattained. From a
few lines written to illustrate a Venetian picture by Maclise _In a
Gondola_ was evolved. If Browning was not entirely accurate in his
topography of Venice, he certainly did not fail in his sense of the
depth and opulence of its colour. Here the abandonment to passion is
relieved by the quaint ingenuities and fancies of love that seeks a
momentary refuge from its own excess, and then returns more eagerly upon
itself; and the shadow of death is ever at hand, but like the shadows of
a Venetian painter it glows with colour.

The motives of two narrative poems, _The Glove_ and _The Flight of the
Duchess_, have much in common; they lie in the contrast between the
world of convention and the world of reality. In each the insulter of