the excessive physical strain; but Mr. Browning has used it as a connecting link between the historic and the imaginary parts of the idyl.  According to this, Pheidippides himself tells his first adventure, to the assembled rulers of Athens:  depicting, in vivid words, the emotions which winged his course, and bore him onwards over mountains and through valleys, with the smooth swiftness of running fire; and he also relates that Pan promised him a personal reward for his “toil,” which was to consist in release from it.  This release he interprets as freedom to return home, and to marry the girl he loves.  It meant a termination to his labours, more tragic, but far more glorious:  to die, proclaiming the victory which they had helped to secure.

Pan is also made to present him with a sprig of fennel—­symbol of Marathon, or the “fennel-field”—­as pledge of his promised assistance.

“HALBERT AND HOB” is the story of a fierce father and son who lived together in solitude, shunned by their fellow-men.  One Christmas night they drifted into a quarrel, in the course of which the son seized his father, and was about to turn him out of doors:  when the latter, with unaccustomed mildness, bade him stay his hand.  Just so, he said, in his youth, had he proceeded against his own father; and at just this stage of the proceeding had a voice in his heart bidden him desist....  And the son thus appealed to desisted also.

This fact is told by Aristotle[104] as an instance of the hereditary nature of anger.  But Mr. Browning sees more in it than that.  If, he declares, Nature creates hard hearts, it is a power beyond hers which softens them; and in his version of “Halbert and Hob” this supernatural power completes the work it has begun.  The two return in silence to their fireside.  The next morning the father is found dead.  The son has become a harmless idiot, to remain so till the end of his life.

“IVAN IVANOVITCH” is the reproduction, with fictitious names and imaginary circumstances, of a popular Russian story, known as “The Judgment of God.”  A young woman travelling through the forest on a winter’s night, is attacked by wolves, and saves her own life by throwing her children to them.  But when she reaches her village, and either confesses the deed or stands convicted of it, one of its inhabitants, by trade a carpenter and the Ivan Ivanovitch of the idyl, lifts the axe which he is plying, and strikes off her head:  this informal retribution being accepted, by those present, as in conformity with the higher law.

Mr. Browning has raised the mother’s act out of the sphere of vulgar crime, by the characteristic method of making her tell her story:  and show herself, as she may easily have been, not altogether bad; though a woman of weak maternal instincts, and one whose nature was powerless against the fear of pain, and the impulse to self-preservation.  She describes with appalling vividness the experiences