poem extends itself to a wider survey of human existence and its meanings.[108] Two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a tragic crisis; Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873) is a story entangled with questions relating to religion; The Inn Album (1875) is a tragedy of the passion of love.  The volume of 1876, Pacchiarotto with other Poems, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative pieces which had come into being during a period of many years.  Finally in La Saisiaz Browning, writing in his own person, records the experience of his spirit in confronting the problem of death.  But it was part of his creed that the gladness of life may take hands with its grief, that the poet who would live mightily must live joyously; and in the volume which contained his poem of strenuous and virile sorrow he did not refrain from including a second piece, The two Poets of Croisic, which has in it much matter of honest mirth, and closes with the declaration that the test of greatness in an artist lies in his power of converting his more than common sufferings into a more than common joy.

Balaustion’s Adventure, dedicated to the Countess Cowper by whom the transcript from Euripides was suggested, or, as Browning will have it, prescribed, proved, as the dedication declares, “the most delightful of May-month amusements” in the spring of 1871.  It was the happiest of thoughts to give the version of Euripides’ play that setting which has for its source a passage at the close of Plutarch’s life of Nicias.  The favours bestowed by the Syracusans upon Athenian slaves and fugitives who could delight them by reciting or singing the verses of Euripides is not to be marvelled at, says Plutarch, “weying a reporte made of a ship of the city of Caunus, that on a time being chased thether by pyrates, thinking to save themselves within their portes, could not at the first be received, but had repulse:  howbeit being demaunded whether they could sing any of Euripides songes, and aunswering that they could, were straight suffered to enter, and come in."[109] From this root blossomed Browning’s romance of the Rhodian girl, who saves her country folk and wins a lover and a husband by her delight in the poetry of one who was more highly honoured abroad than in his own Athens.  Perhaps Browning felt that an ardent girl would be the best interpreter of the womanly heroism and the pathos of “that strangest, saddest, sweetest song,” of Euripides.  Of all its author’s dramas the Alkestis is the most appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the fugitives from the pirate-bark, “at destruction’s very edge,” who are the suppliants to Syracuse.  In accepting the task imposed upon him Browning must have felt that no other play of Euripides could so entirely have borne out the justice of the characterisation of the poet by Mrs Browning in the lines which he prefixed to Balaustions Adventure: