Nothing that Browning has written is more vividly imagined than the encounter of Balaustion with Aristophanes and his crew of revellers on the night when the tidings of the death of Euripides reached Athens; it rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the sanctity of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant and a solemn picture.  The revellers scatter before the presence of Balaustion, and she and the great traducer of Euripides stand face to face.  Nowhere else has Browning presented this conception of the man of vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and splendidly follows the worse: 

     Such domineering deity
    Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
    For his gay brother’s prow, imbrue that path
    Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.

It is as if male force, with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws.  But in truth Aristophanes is half on the side of Balaustion and of Euripides; he must, indeed, make his stand; he is not one to falter or quail; and yet when the sudden cloud falls upon his face he knows that it is his part to make the worse appear the better cause, knowing this all the more because the justice of Balaustion’s regard perceives and recognises his higher self.  Suddenly the Tuphon, “madding the brine with wrath or monstrous sport,” is transformed into something like what the child saw once from the Rhodian sea-coast (the old romantic poet in Browning is here young once more): 

     All at once, large-looming from his wave,
    Out leaned, chin hand-propped, pensive on the ledge,
    A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
    Divine with yearning after fellowship. 
    He rose but breast-high.  So much god she saw;
    So much she sees now, and does reverence.

But in a moment the sea-god is again the sea-monster, with “tail-splash, frisk of fin”; the majestic Aristophanes relapses into the most wonderful of mockers.

No passage in the poem is quite so impressive as this through its strangeness in beauty.  But the entry of Sophocles—­“an old pale-swathed majesty,”—­at the supper which followed the performance of the play, is another of those passages to find which in situ is a sufficient reward for reading many laborious pages that might almost as well have been thrown into an imaginary conversation in prose: 

    Then the grey brow sank low, and Sophokles
    Re-swathed him, sweeping doorward:  mutely passed
    ’Twixt rows as mute.