But Admetos will not allow this; for Alkestis is as spirit to his flesh, and his life without her would be but a passive death.  To which “pile of truth on truth” she rejoins by adding the “one truth more,” that his refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a surrender of the supreme duty laid upon him of reigning a righteous king,—­that this life-purpose of his is above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will undergo for his and its sake, her highest good as it is his.  And in effect, her death, instead of paralysing him, redoubles the vigour of his soul, so that Alkestis, living on in a mind made better by her presence, has not in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim to enter Hades rudely rejected by “the pensive queen o’ the twilight,” for whom death meant just to die, and wanders back accordingly to live once more by Admetos’ side.  Such the story became when the Greek dread of death was replaced by Browning’s spiritual conception of a death glorified by love.  The pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfeebled; no Herakles was needed to pluck this Alkestis from the death she sought, and the rejection of her claim to die is perilously near to Lucianic burlesque.  But, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like radiance of the mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced by the twilight queen, whose eyes

“lingered still
Straying among the flowers of Sicily,”

absorbed in the far memory of the life that Herakles asserted and enforced,—­until, at Alkestis’ summons, she

“broke through humanity
Into the orbed omniscience of a god.”

From his idealised Admetos Browning passed with hardly a pause to attempt the more difficult feat of idealising a living sovereign.  Admetos was ennobled by presenting him as a political idealist; the French Emperor, whose career had closed at Sedan, was in some degree qualified for a parallel operation by the obscurity which still invested the inmost nature of that well-meaning adventurer.  Browning had watched Louis Napoleon’s career with mixed feelings; he had resented the coup d’etat, and still more the annexation of Savoy and Nice after the war of 1859.  But he had never shared the bitter animus which prevailed at home.  He was equally far, no doubt, from sharing the exalted hero-worship which inspired his wife’s Poems before Congress.  The creator of The Italian in England, of Luigi, and Bluphocks, could not but recognise the signal services of Napoleon to the cause of Italian freedom, however sharply he condemned the hard terms on which Italy had been compelled to purchase it.  “It was a great action; but he has taken eighteenpence for it—­which is a pity";[57] it was on the lines of this epigram, already quoted, that eleven years later he still interpreted the fallen emperor, and that he now completed, as it would seem, the abandoned poem of 1860.  He saw in him a man of generous impulses doubled with a borne politician, a