ity, pride,
ardour--all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness,
modesty, tenderness, insight, gravity . . . for Balaustion is like many
women in having, for all her gaiety, more sense of happiness than sense
of humour. It often comes to me as debatable if this be not the most
attractive of deficiencies! Certainly Balaustion persuades us of its
power; for in the _Apology_, her refusal of the Aristophanic Comedy is
firm-based upon that imputed lack in women. No man, thus poised, could
have convinced us of his reality; while she convinces us not only of her
reality, but of her rightness. Again, we must applaud our poet's wisdom
in choosing woman for the Bald Bard's accuser; she is as potent in this
part as in that of Euripides' interpreter.

But what a girl Balaustion is, as well as what a woman! Let us see her
with the little band of friends about her, as in the exquisite
revocation (in the _Apology_) of the first adventure's telling:

". . . O that Spring,
That eve I told the earlier[101:1] to my friends!
Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouth
I wonder, does the streamlet ripple still,
Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?

* * * * *

Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side,
Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase,
And other stars steal on the evening star,
And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"

Then, in the _Adventure_, comes the translation by Browning of the
_Alkestis_ of Euripides, which Balaustion is feigned to have spoken upon
the temple steps at Syracuse. With this we have here no business, though
so entire is his "lyric girl," so fully and perfectly by him conceived,
that not a word of the play but might have been Balaustion's own. This
surely is a triumph of art--to imagine such a speaker for such a piece,
and to blend them both so utterly that the supreme Greek dramatist and
this girl are indivisible. What a woman was demanded for such a feat,
and what a poet for both! May we not indeed say now that Browning was
our singer? Whom but he would have done this--so crowned, so trusted,
us, and so persuaded men that women can be great?

"Its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes--and the way it makes
you thrill with love for Herakles, never before so god-like, because
always before too much the apotheosis of mere physical power. But read
of him in the _Alkestis_