With Echetlos may be mentioned the Virgilian legend of Pan and Luna, a piece of graceful fancy, with its exquisite burden, that

      “Verse of five words, each a boon: 
      Arcadia, night, a cloud, Pan, and the moon.”

Clive, the most popular in style, and certainly one of the finest poems in the volume, is a dramatic monologue very much akin, in subject, treatment and form, to the narratives in the first series.  The story deals with an episode in the life of Clive, when, as a young man, he first proved his courage in the face of a bully whom he had caught cheating at cards.  The poem is full of fire and brilliance, and is a subtle analysis and presentation of the character of Clive.  Its structure is quite in Browning’s best manner:  a central situation, illumined by “what double and treble reflection and refraction!” Like Balzac (whose Honorine, for instance, is constructed on precisely similar lines) Browning often increases the effect of his picture by setting it in a framework, more or less elaborate, by placing the central narrative in the midst of another slighter and secondary one, related to it in some subtle way.  The story of Clive obtains emphasis, and is rendered more impressive, by the lightly but strongly sketched-in figure of the old veteran who tells the tale.  Scarcely anything in the poem seems to me so fine as this pathetic portrait of the lonely old man, sitting, like Colonel Newcome, solitary in his house among his memories, with his boy away:  “I and Clive were friends.”

The Arabian tale of Muleykeh is the most perfect and pathetic piece in the volume.  It is told in singularly fine verse, and in remarkably clear, simple, yet elevated style.  The end is among the great heroic things in poetry.  Hoseyn, though he has neither herds nor flocks, is the richest and happiest of men, for he possesses the peerless mare, Muleykeh the Pearl, whose speed has never been outstripped.  Duhl, the son of Sheyban, who envies Hoseyn and has endeavoured by every means, but without success, to obtain the mare, determines at last to steal her.  He enters Hoseyn’s tent noiselessly by night, saddles Muleykeh, and gallops away.  In an instant Hoseyn is on the back of Buheyseh, the Pearl’s sister, only less fleet than herself, and in pursuit.

      “And Hoseyn—­his blood turns flame, he has learned long since
          to ride,
      And Buheyseh does her part,—­they gain—­they are gaining fast
      On the fugitive pair, and Duhl has Ed-Darraj to cross and quit,
      And to reach the ridge El-Saban,—­no safety till that be spied! 
      And Buheyseh is, bound by bound, but a horse-length off at last,
      For the Pearl has missed the tap of the heel, the touch of the bit.