Arnold, years before, had read unutterable depths of soul in another gipsy child by another shore.

For Browning now, as in the days of the _Flight of the Duchess_, the gipsy symbolised the life of joyous detachment from the constraints of society and civilisation.
The elementary mood, out of which the wondrous woof of reasonings and images is evolved, is simply the instinctive beat of the spirit of romance in us all, in sympathy with these light-hearted losels of the wild, who "cast allegiance off, play truant, nor repine," and though disgraced but seem to relish life the more.
The beautiful _Prologue_--one of the most original lyrics in the language--strikes the keynote:-- "Sometimes, when the weather Is blue, and warm waves tempt To free oneself of tether, And try a life exempt From worldly noise and dust, In the sphere which overbrims With passion and thought,--why, just Unable to fly, one swims....
Emancipate through passion And thought,--with sea for sky, We substitute, in a fashion, For heaven--poetry." It is this "emancipation" from our confinement in the bonds of prose, commonplace, and routine, by a passion and thought-winged imagination, which is the true subject of the poem.

But he chooses to convey his meaning, as usual, through the rich refracting medium of dramatic characters and situations quite unlike his own.

So his "apology for poetry" becomes an item in Don Juan's case for the "poetry" of dalliance with light-o'-loves.

Fifine herself acquires new importance; the emancipated gipsy turns into the pert seductive coquette, while over against her rises the pathetic shadow of the "wife in trouble," her white fingers pressing Juan's arm, "ravishingly pure" in her "pale constraint." Between these three persons the moving drama is played out, ending, like all Don Juan stories, with the triumph of the baser influence.