It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose, commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination, which is the true subject of the poem. But he chooses to convey his meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic characters and situations quite unlike his own. So his "apology for poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance with light-o'-loves. Fifine herself acquires new importance; the emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out, ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser influence. Elvire, with her eloquent silences and wistful pathos, is an exquisite creation,--a wedded sister of Shakespeare's Hero; Fifine, too, with her strutting bravado and "pose half frank, half fierce," shrills her discordant note vivaciously enough. The principal speaker himself is the most complex of Browning's casuists, a marvellously rich and many-hued piece of portraiture. This Juan is deeply versed in all the activities of the imagination which he so eloquently defends. Painting and poetry, science and philosophy, are at his command; above all, he is an artist and a poet in the lore of Love. It is easy to see that the kind of adventure on which Juan claims the right of projecting his imagination has close affinities with the habitual procedure of Browning's own. Juan defends his dealings with the gay fizgig Fifine as a step to the fuller appreciation of Elvire; he demands freedom to escape only as a means of possessing more surely and intimately what he has. And Browning's "emancipation" is not that of the purely Romantic poet, who pursues a visionary abstraction remote from all his visible environment. The emancipated soul, for him, was rather that which incessantly "practised with" its environment, fighting its way through countless intervening films of illusion to the full knowledge of itself and of all that it originally held _in posse_. This might not be an adequate account of his own artistic processes, in which genial instinct played a larger, and resolute will a smaller, part than his invincible athleticism of temperament would suggest. But his marvellous wealth of spontaneous vision was fed and enriched by incessant "practice with" his environment; his idealism was vitalised by the ceaseless play of eye and brain upon the least promising mortal integuments of spirit; he possessed "Elvire" the more securely for having sent forth his adventurous imagination to practise upon innumerable Fifines.