than Sophocles.  Nor do I believe that a Rhodian girl, even with all Athens at the back of her brain, would have conceived it at all.  Then Balaustion makes another comment on the situation, in which there is more of Browning than of herself.  “Admetos,” she says, “has been kept back by the noisy quarrel from seeing into the truth of his own conduct, as he was on the point of doing, for ‘with the low strife comes the little mind.’” But when his father is gone, and Alkestis is borne away, then, in the silence of the house and the awful stillness in his own heart, he sees the truth.  His shame, the whole woe and horror of his failure in love, break, like a toppling wave, upon him, and the drowned truth, so long hidden from him by self, rose to the surface, and appalled him by its dead face.  His soul in seeing true, is saved, yet so las by fire.  At this moment Herakles comes in, leading Alkestis, redeemed from death; and finding, so Balaustion thinks, her husband restored to his right mind.

But, then, we ask, how Alkestis, having found him fail, will live with him again, how she, having topped nobility, will endure the memory of the ignoble in him?  That would be the interesting subject, and the explanation Euripides suggests does not satisfy Balaustion.  The dramatic situation is unfinished.  Balaustion, with her fine instinct, feels that, to save the subject, it ought to be otherwise treated, and she invents a new Admetos, a new Alkestis.  She has heard that Sophocles meant to make a new piece of the same matter, and her balanced judgment, on which Browning insists so often, makes her say, “That is well.  One thing has many sides; but still, no good supplants a good, no beauty undoes another; still I will love the Alkestis which I know.  Yet I have so drunk this poem, so satisfied with it my heart and soul, that I feel as if I, too, might make a new poem on the same matter.”

                Ah, that brave
    Bounty of poets, the one royal race
    That ever was, or will be, in this world! 
    They give no gift that bounds itself and ends
    I’ the giving and the taking:  theirs so breeds
    I’ the heart and soul o’ the taker, so transmutes
    The man who only was a man before,
    That he grows godlike in his turn, can give—­
    He also:  share the poet’s privilege,
    Bring forth new good, new beauty, from the old.

And she gives her conception of the subject, and it further unfolds her character.

When Apollo served Admetos, the noble nature of the God so entered into him that all the beast was subdued in the man, and he became the ideal king, living for the ennoblement of his people.  Yet, while doing this great work, he is to die, still young, and he breaks out, in a bitter calm, against the fate which takes him from the work of his life.

“Not so,” answers Alkestis, “I knew what was coming, and though Apollo urged me not to disturb the course of things, and not to think that any death prevents the march of good or ends a life, yet he yielded; and I die for you—­all happiness.”