row its eye,
creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, and now a flower drops
with a bee inside, and now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch,--
he looks out o'er yon sea which sunbeams cross and recross
till they weave a spider-web (meshes of fire, some great fish breaks
at times), and talks to his own self, howe'er he please,
touching that other, whom his dam called God."

There's a grand passage in `Balaustion's Adventure:
including a transcript from Euripides', descriptive of Herakles
as he returns, after his conflict with Death, leading back Alkestis,
which shows the poet's sympathy with the physical. The passage is
more valuable as revealing that sympathy, from the fact that
it's one of his additions to Euripides:--

"there stood the strength,
Happy as always; something grave, perhaps;
The great vein-cordage on the fret-worked brow,
Black-swollen, beaded yet with battle-drops
The yellow hair o' the hero!--his big frame
A-quiver with each muscle sinking back
Into the sleepy smooth it leaped from late.
Under the great guard of one arm, there leant
A shrouded something, live and woman-like,
Propped by the heart-beats 'neath the lion-coat.
When he had finished his survey, it seemed,
The heavings of the heart began subside,
The helping breath returned, and last the smile
Shone out, all Herakles was back again,
As the words followed the saluting hand."

It is not so much the glory of flesh which Euripides represents
in Herakles, as the indulgence of appetite, at a time, too,
when that indulgence is made to appear the more culpable and gross.

This idea of "the value and significance of flesh", it is important
to note, along with the predominant spiritual bearing
of Browning's poetry. It articulates everywhere the spiritual,
so to speak--makes it healthy and robust, and protects it
against volatility and from running into mysticism.

2. The Idea of Personality as embodied in Browning's Poetry.

A cardinal idea in Browning's poetry is the regeneration of men
through a personality who brings fresh stuff for them to mould,
interpret, and prove right,--new feeling fresh from God--
whose life re-teaches them what life should be, what faith is,
loyalty and simpleness, all once revealed, but taught them
so long since that they have but mere tradition of the fact,--
truth copied falteringly from copies faint, th