proprieties, the breaker of bounds is a woman; in each the choice lies
between a life of pretended love and vain dignities and a life of
freedom and true love; and in each case the woman makes her glad escape
from what is false to what is true. In restating the incident of the
glove Browning brings into play his casuistry, but casuistry is here
used to justify a passion which the poet approves, to elucidate, not to
obscure, what he represents as the truth of the situation. _The Flight
of the Duchess_ in part took its rise "from a line, 'Following the Queen
of the Gipsies, O!'--the burden of a song, which the poet, when a boy,
heard a woman singing on a Guy Fawkes' day." Some two hundred lines were
given to Hood for his magazine, at a time when Hood needed help, and
death was approaching him. The poem was completed some months later. It
is written, like _The Glove_, in verse that runs for swiftness' sake,
and that is pleased to show its paces on a road rough with boulder-like
rhymes. The little Duchess is a wild bird caged in the strangely twisted
wirework of artificial modes and forms. She is a prisoner who is starved
for real life, and stifles; the fresh air and the open sky are good, are
irresistible--and that is the whole long poem in brief. Such a small
prisoner, all life and fire, was before many months actually delivered
from her cage in Wimpole Street, and Robert Browning himself, growing in
stature amid his incantations, played the part of the gipsy.

Another Duchess, who pined for freedom and never attained it, has her
cold obituary notice from her bereaved Duke's lips in the _Dramatic
Lyrics_ of 1842. _My Last Duchess_ was there made a companion poem to
_Count Gismond_; they are the pictures of the bond-woman and of the
freed-woman in marriage. The Italian Duchess revolts from the law of
wifehood no further than a misplaced smile or a faint half-flush,
betraying her inward breathings and beamings of the spirit; the noose of
the ducal proprieties is around her throat, and when it tightens "then