In “Apollo and the Fates” the fanciful, or rather fantastic element preponderates.  It represents Apollo as descending into the realms of darkness and pleading with the Fate Sisters for the life of Admetus, the thread of which Atropos is about to clip; and shows how he obtained for him a conditional reprieve by intoxicating the sisters with wine.  The sequel to this incident has been given in Mr. Browning’s transcript from “Alkestis”; and the present poem is introduced by references to that work of Euripides, to the “Eumenides” of AEschylus and to Homer’s “Hymn to Mercury”:  the general sense of the passages indicated being this:—­

Euripides.—­“Admetus—­whom, cheating the fates, I saved from death.”

AEschylus (to Apollo).—­“Aye, such were your feats in the house of Pheres, where you persuaded the fates to make a mortal immortal:  you it was destroyed the ancient arrangement and deceived the goddesses with wine.”

Homer.—­“The Fates are three virgin sisters,—­winged and white-haired,—­dwelling below Parnassus:  they feed on honey, and so get drunk, and readily tell the truth.  If deprived of it they delude.”

Mr. Browning, however, varies the legend, first by making the Fates find truth in the fumes of wine; and, secondly, by assuming that they never knew an inspiring drunkenness until they tasted it:  profoundly intoxicating as their (fermented) honey must have been.

Apollo urges his request that Admetus, now threatened with premature death, may live out the appointed seventy years.  The Fates retort on him by exclamations on the worthlessness of such a boon.  They enumerate the follies and miseries which beset the successive stages of man’s earthly career, and maintain that its only brightness lies in the delusive sunshine, the glamour of hope, with which he (Apollo) gilds it.  Apollo owns that human happiness may rest upon illusion, but undertakes to show that man holds the magic within himself; and to that end persuades the sisters to drain a bowl of wine which he has brought with him.  In the moment’s intoxication the scales fall from their eyes, and they see that life is good.  They see that if its earlier course means conflict, old age is its recorded victory.  They see it enriched by the joys which are only remembered as by the good which only might have been.  They praise the Actual and still more the Potential—­the infinite possibilities to which Man is born and which imagination alone can anticipate; and joining hands with Apollo in a delirious dance, proclaim the discovery of the lost secret:  Fancy compounded with Fact.