This idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more or less expressed or implied in very much of Browning’s poetry, but nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so consecutively, as here.  In Martin Relph (which “embodies,” says Mrs. Orr, “a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was himself a boy”) we have an instance of the tide “omitted,” and a terrible picture of the remorse which follows.  Martin Relph has the chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves and of his rival whom she loves.  The chance is but of an instant’s duration.  He hesitates, and the moment is for ever lost.  In that one moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable agony.  In Ivan Ivanovitch (founded on a popular Russian story of a woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have a twofold illustration of the theme.  The testing-moment comes to the mother, Louscha, and again to Ivan Ivanovitch.  While the woman fails terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a strange and awful nobility of action, and “acts for God.” Halbert and Hob, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly concrete form.  The crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete, an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry fruit.  In Ned Bratts (suggested by the story of “Old Tod,” in Bunyan’s Life and Death of Mr. Badman[55]) we have a prompt and quite hurried taking of the tide:  the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of the “worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged.” Pheidippides (the legend of the runner who brought the news of Marathon to Athens, and died in the utterance) illustrates the idea in a more obvious but less individual way.

Perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a quality of compassionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in the book quite comes up to Halbert and Hob.  There is hardly in Browning a more elemental touch than that of:  “A boy threw stones:  he picked them up and stored them in his breast.” Martin Relph, besides being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience.  Every word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. Ivan Ivanovitch is, as a narrative, still finer:  as a piece of story-telling Browning has perhaps never excelled it.  Nothing could be more graphic and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves:  the effective change from iambs to anapaests gives their very motion.