died only to be rejected by Hades, as still living, and with a more potent life, in her husband’s heart and will.  Yet the mortal cloud is round these mortals still; they cannot see things as the gods see.  And, for all their hopes and endeavours, the earth which they would renew and make as heaven, remains the old incredulous, unconverted earth,—­“Such is the envy Gods still bear mankind.”  And in such an earth, if not for them, assuredly for others, Herakles may find great deeds to do.

Balaustion has the unique distinction of being heroine throughout two of Browning’s poems; and of both we may say that the genius of Euripides is the hero. Aristophanes’ Apology is written from first to last with unflagging energy; the translation of the “Herakles” which it includes is a masculine and masterly effort to transport the whole sense and spirit of the original into English verse, and the rendering of the choral passages into lyric form gives it an advantage over the transcript of the “Alkestis.”  Perhaps not a little of the self-defence of Aristophanes and his statement of the case against Euripides could have been put as well or better in a critical essay in prose; but the method of Browning enables him to mingle, in a dramatic fashion, truth with sophistry, and to make both serve his purpose of presenting not only the case but the character of the great Greek maker of comedy.  Balaustion is no longer the ardent girl of the days of her first adventure; she is a wife, with the dignity, the authority of womanhood and wifehood; she has known the life of Athens with its evil and its good; she has been the favoured friend of Euripides; she is capable of confronting his powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born vapours and amid base surroundings.

Athens, “the life and light of the whole world,” has sunk under the power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her Euthukles.  The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the verse has in it the leap and race of the prow.  Balaustion, stricken at heart, yet feels that this tragedy of Athens brings the tragic katharsis; the justice of the gods is visible in it; and above man’s wickedness and folly she reaches to “yon blue liberality of heaven.”  It seems as if the spirit which might have saved Athens is that of the loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion of Euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought Athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the work of Aristophanes.  But Aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a moralist Thus only can truth in the end stand clear, assured of its supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth.