river with its drenched despairing willows, the blood-trampled mire and
wrecked torture-engine, the poisonous herbage and palsied oak, and
finally the mountains, ignoble as the plain--"mere ugly heights and
heaps," ranged round the deadly den of the Dark Tower. But Browning's
horror-world differs from Coleridge's in the pervading sense that the
powers which control its issues are "at play." The catastrophe is not
the less tragic for that; but the heroic knight is not a culprit who has
provoked the vengeance of his pursuers, but a quarry whose course they
follow with grim half-suppressed laughter as he speeds into the trap.
The hoary cripple cannot hide his malicious glee, the "stiff blind
horse" is as grotesque as he is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it
sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth;
in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the
mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower
itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to
romance; while round it lie the sportsmen assembled to see the end--

"The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay."


V.


But the scenery of Italy, with all its appeals of picturesque outline
and glowing colour, interested Browning less than its painting,
sculpture, and music. "Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art," Landor
declared in one of his stately epitaphs on himself; Browning would, in
this sense of the terms at least, have inverted their order. Casa Guidi
windows commanded a view, not only of revolutionary throngs, but of the