The two series of Dramatic Idyls included some conspicuous successes.  The classical poems Pheidippides, Echetlos, Pan and Luna, idyls heroic and mythological, invite us by their beauty to return to them again and again.  Browning’s sympathy with gallantry in action, with self-devotion to a worthy cause, was never more vividly rendered than in the first of these poems.  The runner of Athens is a more graceful brother of the Breton sailor who saved a fleet for France; but the vision of majestical Pan in “the cool of a cleft” exalts our human heroism into relation with the divine benevolence, and the reward of release from labour is proportionally higher than a holiday with the “belle Aurore.”  Victory and then domestic love is the human interpretation of Pan’s oracular promise; but the gifts of the gods are better than our hopes and it proves to be victory and death: 

     He flung down his shield,
    Ran like fire once more:  and the space ’twixt the Fennel-field
    And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
    Till in he broke:  “Rejoice, we conquer!” Like wine through clay,
    Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died—­the bliss!

The companion poem of Marathon, the story of the nameless clown, the mysterious holder of the ploughshare, is not less inspiring.  The unknown champion, so plain in his heroic magnitude of mind, so brilliant as he flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the soil, which hides itself in the furrow and flashes into the harvest; and it is his glory to be obscured for ever by his deed—­“the great deed ne’er grows small.”  Browning’s development of the Vergilian myth—­“si credere dignum est”—­of Pan and Luna astonishes by its vehement sensuousness and its frank chastity; and while the beauty of the Girl-moon and the terror of her betrayal are realised with the utmost energy of imagination, we are made to feel that all which happens is the transaction of a significant dream or legend.

In contrast with these classical pieces, Halbert and Hob reads like a fragment from some Scandinavian saga telling of the life of forlorn and monstrous creatures, cave-dwellers, who are less men than beasts.  Yet father and son are indeed men; the remorse which checks the last outrage against paternity is the touch of the finger of God upon human hearts; and though old Halbert sits dead,

    With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face,

and young Hob henceforth goes tottering, muttering, mumbling with a mindless docility, they are, like Browning’s men of the Paris morgue, only “apparent failures”; there was in them that spark of divine illumination which can never be wholly extinguished.  Positive misdeeds, the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to make Browning’s faith or hope falter.  It is the absence of human virtue which appals him; if the salt have lost its