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.
Moreover, Browning's poem is too much in the vague.