The whole work is a vindication of the power of poetry, as exerted in itself, and as reproduced in those who have received its fruits (pages 110, 111); and Balaustion herself displays it in this secondary form, by suggesting a version of the story of Alkestis, more subtly, if less simply, beautiful than the original.  She makes Love the conqueror of Death.  According to her, the music made by Apollo among Admetus’s flocks has tamed every selfish passion in the King’s soul; and when the time comes for his wife to die, he refuses the sacrifice.  “Zeus has decreed that their two lives shall be one; and if they must be severed, he must go who was the body, not she, who was the soul, of their joint existence.”  But Alkestis declares that the reality of that existence lies not in her but in him, and she bids him look at her once more before his decision is made.  In this look, her soul enters into his; and, thus subduing him, she expires.  But when she reaches the nether world she is rejected as a deceiver.  “The death she brings to it is a mockery, since it doubles the life she has left behind.”  Proserpine sends her back to her husband’s side; and the “lost eyes” re-open beneath his gaze, while it still embraces her.

Apollo smiles sadly at the ingenuousness of mortals, who thus imagine that the chain of eternal circumstance could snap in one human life; at their blindness to those seeds of pity and tenderness which the crushed promise of human happiness sets free.  Yet he seems to think they lose nothing by either.  “They do well to value their little hour.  They do well to treasure the warm heart’s blood, of which no outpouring could tinge the paleness or fill the blank of eternity, the power of love which transforms their earthly homes, their

       ... hopes and fears, so blind and yet so sweet
       With death about them.” (p. 115.)

“Balaustion” means wild pomegranate flower; and the girl has been so called on account of her lyric gifts.  She recalls the pomegranate tree, because its leaves are cooling to the brow, its seed and blossom grateful to the sense, and because the nightingale is never distant from it.  She will keep the name for life—­so she tells her friends—­and with it a better thing which her songs have gained her.  One youth came daily to the temple-steps at Syracuse to hear her.  He was at her side at Athens when she landed.  They will be married at this next full moon.

“Alkestis” failed “to get the prize” when its author was competing with Sophocles.  “But Euripides has had his reward:  in the sympathies which he has stirred; in the genius which he has inspired.  His crown came direct from Zeus.”

We need not name the poetess whom Mr. Browning quotes at the close of this poem.  The painter so generously eulogized is F. Leighton.