“It shall never be,” replies Admetos; “our two lives are one.  But I am the body, thou art the soul; and the body shall go, and not the soul.  I claim death.”

“No,” answered Alkestis; “the active power to rule and weld the people into good is in the man.  Thou art the acknowledged power.  And as to the power which, thou sayest, I give thee, as to the soul of me—­take it, I pour it into thee.  Look at me.”  And as he looks, she dies, and the king is left—­still twofold as before, with the soul of Alkestis in him—­himself and her.  So is Fate cheated, and Alkestis in Admetos is not dead.  A passage follows of delicate and simple poetry, written by Browning in a manner in which I would he had oftener written.  To read it is to regret that, being able to do this, he chose rather to write, from time to time, as if he were hewing his way through tangled underwood.  No lovelier image of Proserpina has been made in poetry, not even in Tennyson’s Demeter, than this—­

    And even while it lay, i’ the look of him,
    Dead, the dimmed body, bright Alkestis’ soul
    Had penetrated through the populace
    Of ghosts, was got to Kore,—­throned and crowned
    The pensive queen o’ the twilight, where she dwells
    Forever in a muse, but half away
    From flowery earth she lost and hankers for,—­
    And there demanded to become a ghost
    Before the time. 
                Whereat the softened eyes
    Of the lost maidenhood that lingered still
    Straying among the flowers in Sicily,
    Sudden was startled back to Hades’ throne
    By that demand:  broke through humanity
    Into the orbed omniscience of a God,
    Searched at a glance Alkestis to the soul
    And said ... 
    “Hence, thou deceiver!  This is not to die,
    If, by the very death which mocks me now,
    The life, that’s left behind and past my power,
    Is formidably doubled ...” 
    And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,
    The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;
    And lo, Alkestis was alive again,
    And of Admetos’ rapture who shall speak?

The old conception has more reality.  This is in the vague world of modern psychical imagination.  Nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it enlarges Browning’s picture of the character of Balaustion.

Her character is still further enlarged in Aristophanes’ Apology.  That poem, if we desire intellectual exercise, illuminated by flashings of imagination, is well worth reading, but to comprehend it fully, one must know a great deal of Athenian life and of the history of the Comic Drama.  It is the defence by Aristophanes of his idea of the business, the method, and the use of Comedy.  How far what he says is Browning speaking for Aristophanes, and how far it is Browning speaking for himself, is hard to tell.  And it would please him to leave that purposely obscure.  What is alive and intense in the poem is, first, the realisation of Athenian life in several scenes, pictured with all Browning’s astonishing force of presentation, as, for instance, the feast after the play, and the grim entrance of Sophocles, black from head to foot, among the glittering and drunken revellers, to announce the death of Euripides.