lift of Hebraic sublimity at the close.  The Epilogue returns to the combative apologetics of the title poem; but, unlike that, does attempt some reply to the cavils of the discontented.  They cannot have the strong and the sweet—­body and bouquet—­at once, he tells them in effect, and he chooses to be strong, to give the good grape and leave the cowslips growing in the meadow.  The argument was but another sally of the poet’s good-humoured chaff, and would not have stood the scrutiny of his subtler mind.  Doubtless he, like Ben Jonson, inclined to see signs of the “strong” in the astringent and the gritty; but no one knew better, when he chose, to wed his “strength” with “sweetness.”  The falling-off of the present volume compared with Men and Women or Dramatis Personae lay less in the lack of either quality than in his failure to bring them together.  Of the “stiff brew” there is plenty; but the choicest aroma comes from that “wine of memories”—­the fragrant reminiscences—­which the poet affected to despise.  The epilogue ends, incorrigibly, with a promise to “posset and cosset” the cavilling reader henceforward with “nettle-broth,” good for the sluggish blood and the disordered stomach.

The following year brought a production which the cavilling reader might excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat.  For the translation of the Agamemnon (1877) was not in any sense a serious contribution to the English knowledge and love of Greek drama.  The Balaustion “transcripts” had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the finer qualities of Greek dramatic style.  But Browning seems to have gone to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the Greek drama at its best owed to Greek speech.  And he has little difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very interesting and instructive to the student of Browning’s mind.  Nowhere else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets the heart and the conscience of nations.  His acute individualism in effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation.

[Footnote 61:  It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of AEschylus.  It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.]