“Was that—­wind? 
    Anyhow, Droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs,
    Snorts,—­never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough’s
    Only the wind:  yet, no—­our breath goes up too straight! 
    Still the low sound,—­less low, loud, louder, at a rate
    There’s no mistaking more!  Shall I lean out—­look—­learn
    The truth whatever it be?  Pad, pad!  At last, I turn—­
    ’Tis the regular pad of the wolves in pursuit of the life in
        the sledge! 
    An army they are:  close-packed they press like the thrust of a wedge: 
    They increase as they hunt:  for I see, through the pine-trunks
        ranged each side,
    Slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide
    The four-footed steady advance.  The foremost—­none may pass: 
    They are elders and lead the line, eye and eye—­green-glowing brass! 
    But a long way distant still.  Droug, save us!  He does his best: 
    Yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,—­one reaches.... 
        How utter the rest?”

The setting of the story, the vast motionless Russian landscape, the village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the revelation of the woman’s character, the exposure of her culpable weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art.  There are moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines, above all in those two pregnant words:  “How otherwise? asked he.”

Ned Bratts takes almost the same position among Browning’s humorous poems that Ivan Ivanovitch does among his narratives.  It is a whole comedy in itself.  Surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect art and the subtlest sympathy.  What opening could be a better preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of Ned Bratts than the wonderful description of the hot day?  It serves to put us into precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that follows.  Dickens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene, nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously converted by Bunyan and his book.

In the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, Pheidippides, with its clear Greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely contrasted.  The measure is of Browning’s invention, and is finely appropriate to the character of the poem.

      “So, to this day, when friend meets friend, the word of salute
      Is still ’Rejoice!’—­his word which brought rejoicing indeed. 
      So is Pheidippides happy for ever,—­the noble strong man
      Who could race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a God
          loved so well
      He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell
      Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began,
      So to end gloriously—­once to shout, thereafter be mute: 
      ‘Athens is saved!’ Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed.”