She is as much at home with the hero of earth, the highest manhood, as she is with the gods.  When Herakles comes on the scene she cannot say enough about him; and she conceives him apart from the Herakles of Euripides.  She paints in him, and Browning paints through her, the idea of the full, the perfect man; and it is not the ideal of the cultivated, of the sensitive folk.  It is more also a woman’s than a man’s ideal.  For, now, suddenly, into the midst of the sorrow of the house, every one wailing, life full of penury and inactivity, there leaps the “gay cheer of a great voice,” the full presence of the hero, his “weary happy face, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the more.”  His very voice, which smiled at sorrow, and his look, which, saying sorrow was to be conquered, proclaimed to all the world “My life is in my hand to give away, to make men glad,” seemed to dry up all misery at its source, for his love of man makes him always joyful.  When Admetos opened the house to him, and did not tell him of his wife’s death, Balaustion comments “The hero, all truth, took him at his word, and then strode off to feast.”  He takes, she thought, the present rest, the physical food and drink as frankly as he took the mighty labours of his fate.  And she rejoices as much in his jovial warmth, his joy in eating and drinking and singing, and festivity, as in his heroic soul.  They go together, these things, in a hero.

    Making the most o’ the minute, that the soul
    And body, strained to height a minute since,
    Might lie relaxed in joy, this breathing space,
    For man’s sake more than ever;

He slew the pest of the marish, yesterday; to-day he takes his fill of food, wine, song and flowers; to-morrow he will slay another plague of mankind.

So she sings, praising aloud the heroic temper, as mighty in the natural joys of natural life, in the strength and honour of the body, as in the saving of the world from pain and evil.  But this pleasure of the senses, though in the great nature, is in it under rule, and the moment Herakles hears of Alkestis dead, he casts aside, in “a splendour of resolve,” the feast, wine, song, and garlands, and girds himself to fight with Death for her rescue And Balaustion, looking after him as he goes, cries out the judgment of her soul on all heroism.  It is Browning’s judgment also, one of the deepest things in his heart; a constant motive in his poetry, a master-thought in his life.

    Gladness be with thee, Helper of our world! 
    I think this is the authentic sign and seal
    Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
    And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
    Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
    And recommence at sorrow:  drops like seed
    After the blossom, ultimate of all. 
    Say, does the seed scorn earth and seek the sun? 
    Surely it has no other end and aim
    Than to drop, once more die into the ground,
    Taste cold and darkness and oblivion there: 
    And thence rise, tree-like grow through pain to joy,
    More joy and most joy,—­do man good again.