We understand that she has drunk deep of Socrates, that her spiritual sense reached onward to the Platonic Socrates.  In this supersensuous world of thought she is quieted out of the weakness which made her miserable over the fall of Athens; and in the quiet, Browning, who will lift his favourite into perfectness, adds to her spiritual imagination the dignity of that moral judgment which the intellect of genius gathers from the facts of history.  In spite of her sorrow, she grasps the truth that there was justice in the doom of Athens.  Let justice have its way.  Let the folk die who pulled her glory down.  This is her prophetic strain, the strength of the Hebrew in the Greek.

And then the prophet in the woman passes, and the poet in her takes the lyre.  She sees the splendid sunset.  Why should its extravagance of glory run to waste?  Let me build out of it a new Athens, quarry out the golden clouds and raise the Acropolis, and the rock-hewn Place of Assembly, whence new orators may thunder over Greece; and the theatre where AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, godlike still, may contend for the prize.  Yet—­and there is a further change of thought—­yet that may not be.  To build that poetic vision is to slip away from reality, and the true use of it.  The tragedy is there—­irrevocable.  Let it sink deep in us till we see Rhodes shining over the sea.  So great, so terrible, so piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul and seen in memory, it will do for us what the great tragedians made their tragic themes do for their hearers.  It will purify the heart by pity and terror from the baseness and littleness of life.  Our small hatreds, jealousies and prides, our petty passions will be rebuked, seem nothing in its mighty sorrow.

    What else in life seems piteous any more
    After such pity, or proves terrible
    Beside such terror;

This is the woman—­the finest creature Browning drew, young and fair and stately, with her dark hair and amber eyes, lovely—­the wild pomegranate flower of a girl—­as keen, subtle and true of intellect as she is lovely, able to comment on and check Euripides, to conceive a new play out of his subject, to be his dearest friend, to meet on equality Aristophanes; so full of lyric sympathy, so full of eager impulse that she thrills the despairing into action, enslaves a city with her eloquence, charms her girl-friends by the Ilissus, and so sends her spirit into her husband that, when the Spartans advise the razing of Athens to the ground he saves the city by those famous lines of Euripides, of which Milton sang; so at one with natural beauty, with all beauty, that she makes it live in the souls of men; so clear in judgment that she sees the right even when it seems lost in the wrong, that she sees the justice of the gods in the ruin of the city she most loved; so poetic of temper that everything speaks to her of life, that she acknowledges the poetry which rises out of the foulness she hates in Aristophanes, that she loves