_The Patriot_ is again Italian, suggested perhaps by the swift revolutions and restorations which Browning had witnessed in Florence, and again it uses with striking effect the principle of contrast; the patriot who a year ago had his intoxicating triumph is now on his way to the scaffold.

His year's toil for the good of his people has turned into a year's misdeeds, his life is a failure; but Browning characteristically wrings a victory out of defeat; the crowd at the shambles' gate may hoot; it is better so, for now the martyr can throw himself upon God, the Paymaster of all his labourers at the close of day.

The most remarkable of these poems, which refuse to take their places in a group, is that forlorn romance of weary and depressed heroism, _Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came_.

It is in the main a fantaisie of description; but involved with the descriptive study is a romantic motive.

The external suggestions for the poem were no more than the words from _King Lear_ which form the title, a tower seen in the Carrara mountains, a painting seen in Paris, and the figure of a horse in the tapestry of the drawing-room of Casa Guidi.[64] In his own mind Browning may have put the question: Of all the feats of knight-errantry which is the hardest?
Not to combat with dragons, or robbers, or salvage men; not to bear down rival champions in a rapture of battle.