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The forests had done it; there they stood; We caught for a moment the powers at play: They had mingled us so, for once and good, Their work was done, we might go or stay, They relapsed to their ancient mood.
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were, in fact, for Browning as well as for his lovers, rare and fitful exceptions to the general nonchalance of Nature towards human affairs. The powers did good, as they did evil,
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; intervening with a kind of cynical or ironical detachment (like Jaques plighting Touchstone and Audrey) in an alien affair of hearts. A certain eerie playfulness is indeed a recurring trait in Browning's highly individual feeling about Nature; the uncanny playfulness of a wild creature of boundless might only half intelligible to man, which man contemplates with mingled joy, wonder, and fear. Joy, when the brown old Earth wears her good gigantic smile, on an autumn morning; wonder, when he watches the
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in the teeming life of the Campagna; fear, when, on a hot August midnight, Earth tosses stormily on her couch. And all these notes of feelings are struck, with an intensity and a boldness of invention which make it unique among his writings, in the great romantic legend of _Childe Roland_. What the _Ancient Mariner_ is in the poetry of the mysterious terrors and splendours of the sea, that _Childe Roland_ is in the poetry of bodeful horror, of haunted desolation, of waste and plague, ragged distortion, and rotting ugliness in landscape. The Childe, like the Mariner, advances through an atmosphere and scenery of steadily gathering menace; the
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Nature,
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among her scrub of thistle and dock, grows malignant; to the barren waste succeed the spiteful little 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--
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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
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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
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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
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; the mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower itself is
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The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay.
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Nature I loved, and after Nature, Art,