Browning, who delights to show how good is brought out of evil, or what appears such to mortal eyes, is not content with this.  He must trace the whole process of the purification of the soul of Admetos, by sorrow and its cruel yet beneficent reality, and in his commentary he emphasises each point of development in that process.  When his wife lies at the point of death the sorrow of Admetos is not insincere, but there was a childishness in it, for he would not confront the fact that the event was of his own election.  Presently she has departed, and he begins to taste the truth, to distinguish between a sorrow rehearsed in fancy and endured in fact.  In greeting Herakles he rises to a manlier strain, puts tears away, and accepts the realities of life and death; he will not add ill to ill, as the sentimentalist does, but will be just to the rights of earth that remain; he catches some genuine strength from the magnanimous presence of the hero-god.  He renders duty to the dead; is quieted; and enters more and more into the sternness of his solitary wayfaring.  In dealing with the ignoble wrangle with old Pheres the critic is hard set; but Balaustion, speaking as interpreter for Browning, explains that for a little the king lapses back from the firmer foothold which he had attained.  Perhaps it would have been wiser to admit that Euripides has marred his own work by this grim tragic-comic encounter of crabbed age and youth.  But it is true that one who has much to give, like Alkestis, gives freely; and one who has little to give, like Pheres, clutches that little desperately and is starved not only in possessions but in soul.  For Browning the significance of the scene lies in the idea, which if not just is ingenious, that the encounter with Pheres has an educational value for Admetos; he detests his father because he sees in him an image of his own egoism, and thus he learns more profoundly to hate his baser self.  When the body of Alkestis has been borne away and the king re-enters his desolate halls the full truth breaks in upon him; nothing can be as it has been before—­“He stared at the impossible mad life”; he has learnt that life, which yet shall be rightly lived, is a harder thing than death: 

    He was beginning to be like his wife.

And those around him felt that having descended in grief so far to the truth of things, he could not but return to the light an altered and a better man.  Instructed so deeply in the realities of sorrow, Admetos is at last made worthy to receive the blessed realities of joy with the words,

    When I betray her, though she is no more,
    May I die.

The regeneration of Admetos is accomplished.  How much in all this exposition is derived from the play, how much is added to it, may be left for the consideration of the reader who will compare the original with the transcript.