... “o’er the boat side, quick, what change, Watch—­in the water!  But a second since, It laughed a ripply spread of sun and sea, Ray fused with wave, to never disunite.  Now, sudden, all the surface hard and black, Lies a quenched light, dead motion:  what the cause?  Look up, and lo, the menace of a cloud Has solemnised the sparkling, spoiled the sport!  Just so, some overshadow, some new care Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face.”

Her feeling for nature is as strong us her feeling for man, and both are woven together.

All her powers have now ripened, and the last touch has been given to them by her ideal sorrow for Athens, the country of her soul, where high intelligence and imagination had created worlds.  She leaves it now, ruined and degraded, and the passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of Balaustion into spiritual splendour.  Athens, “hearted in her heart,” has perished ignobly.  Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies—­in the embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean.  This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery and disgrace, “Oh,” she cries, “bear me away—­wind, wave and bark!” But Browning does not leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her heart.  He gives her the spiritual passion of genius.  She is swept beyond her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the gods, with the pure Ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see Euripides.  In these high thoughts she will outlive her sorrow.

    Why should despair be?  Since, distinct above
    Man’s wickedness and folly, flies the wind
    And floats the cloud, free transport for our soul
    Out of its fleshly durance dim and low,—­
    Since disembodied soul anticipates
    (Thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint)
    Above all crowding, crystal silentness,
    Above all noise, a silver solitude:—­
    Surely, where thought so bears soul, soul in time
    May permanently bide, “assert the wise,”
    There live in peace, there work in hope once more—­
    O nothing doubt, Philemon!  Greed and strife,
    Hatred and cark and care, what place have they
    In yon blue liberality of heaven? 
    How the sea helps!  How rose-smit earth will rise
    Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes! 
    Heaven, earth and sea, my warrant—­in their name,
    Believe—­o’er falsehood, truth is surely sphered,
    O’er ugliness beams beauty, o’er this world
    Extends that realm where, “as the wise assert,”
    Philemon, thou shalt see Euripides
    Clearer than mortal sense perceived the man!