The powers did good, as they did evil, "at play"; 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 "miracles wrought in play" 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.