These, all and every one, The King judged, sitting in the sun. LUIGI. That King should still judge sitting in the sun! His councillors, on left and right, Looked anxious up,--but no surprise Disturbed the King's old smiling eyes Where the very blue had turned to white. 'Tis said, a Python scared one day The breathless city, till he came, With forty tongue and eyes on flame, Where the old King sat to judge alway; But when he saw the sweepy hair Girt with a crown of berries rare Which the god will hardly give to wear To the maiden who singeth, dancing bare In the altar-smoke by the pine-torch lights, At his wondrous forest rites,-- Seeing this, he did not dare Approach the threshold in the sun, Assault the old king smiling there. Such grace had kings when the world begun! Then there are two other romantic pieces, not ringing with this early note, but having in them a wafting scent of the Provençal spirit. One is the song sung by Pippa when she passes the room where Jules and Phene are talking--the song of Kate, the Queen. The other is the cry Rudel, the great troubadour, sent out of his heart to the Lady of Tripoli whom he never saw, but loved. The subject is romantic, but that, I think, is all the romance in it. It is not Rudel who speaks but Browning. It is not the twelfth but the nineteenth century which has made all that analysis and over-worked illustration. There remain, on this matter, _Childe Roland_ and the _Flight of the Duchess_. I believe that _Childe Roland_ emerged, all of a sudden and to Browning's surprise, out of the pure imagination, like the Sea-born Queen; that Browning did not conceive it beforehand; that he had no intention in it, no reason for writing it, and no didactic or moral aim in it. It was not even born of his will. Nor does he seem to be acquainted with the old story on the subject which took a ballad form in Northern England. The impulse to write it was suddenly awakened in him by that line out of an old song the Fool quotes in _King Lear_. There is another tag of a song in _Lear_ which stirs a host of images in the imagination; and out of which some poet might create a romantic lyric: Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind. But it does not produce so concrete a set of images as _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_. Browning has made that his own, and what he has done is almost romantic. Almost romantic, I say, because the peculiarities of Browning's personal genius appear too strongly in _Childe Roland_ for pure romantic story, in which the idiosyncrasy of the poet, the personal element of his fancy, are never dominant. The scenery, the images, the conduct of the tales of romance, are, on account of their long passage through the popular mind, impersonal.