In this book we see her in her youth, her powers as yet untouched by heavy sorrow.  In the next, in Aristophanes’ Apology, we first find her in matured strength, almost mastering Aristophanes; and afterwards in the depth of grief, as she flies with her husband over the seas to Rhodes, leaving behind her Athens, the city of her heart, ruined and enslaved.  The deepest passion in her, the patriotism of the soul, is all but broken-hearted.  Yet, she is the life and support of all who are with her; even a certain gladness breaks forth in her, and she secures for all posterity the intellectual record of Athenian life and the images, wrought to vitality, of some of the greater men of Athens.  So we possess her completely.  Her life, her soul, its growth and strength, are laid before us.  To follow her through these two poems is to follow their poetry.  Whenever we touch her we touch imagination. Aristophanes’ Apology is illuminated by Balaustion’s eyes.  A glimpse here and there of her enables us to thread our way without too great weariness through a thorny undergrowth of modern and ancient thought mingled together on the subject of the Apology.

In Balaustion’s Adventure she tells her tale, and recites, as she did at Syracuse, the Alkestis to her four friends.  But she does more; she comments on it, as she did not at Syracuse.  The comments are, of course, Browning’s, but he means them to reveal Balaustion.  They are touched throughout with a woman’s thought and feeling, inflamed by the poetic genius with which Browning has endowed her.  Balaustion is his deliberate picture of genius the great miracle.

The story of the Alkestis begins before the play.  Apollo, in his exile, having served King Admetos as shepherd, conceives a friendship for the king, helps him to his marriage, and knowing that he is doomed to die in early life, descends to hell and begs the Fates to give him longer life.  That is a motive, holding in it strange thoughts of life and death and fate, which pleased Browning, and he treats it separately, and with sardonic humour, in the Prologue to one of his later volumes.  The Fates refuse to lengthen Admetos’ life, unless some one love him well enough to die for him.  They must have their due at the allotted time.

The play opens when that time arrives.  We see, in a kind of Prologue, Apollo leaving the house of Admetos and Death coming to claim his victim.  Admetos has asked his father, mother, relations and servants to die instead of him.  None will do it; but his wife, Alkestis, does.  Admetos accepts her sacrifice.  Her dying, her death, the sorrow of Admetos is described with all the poignant humanity of Euripides.  In the meantime Herakles has come on the scene, and Admetos, though steeped in grief, conceals—­his wife’s death and welcomes his friend to his house.  As Alkestis is the heroine of self-sacrifice, Admetos is the hero of hospitality.  Herakles feasts, but the indignant bearing of an old servant attracts his notice, and he finds out the truth.  He is shocked, but resolves to attack Death himself, who is bearing away Alkestis.  He meets and conquers Death and brings back Alkestis alive to her husband.  So the strong man conquers the Fates, whom even Apollo could not subdue.