ble--as it was. To see the eternal unseen is the
dower of imagination in its loftiest mood.

She is as much at home with the hero of earth, the highest manhood, as
she is with the gods. When Herakles comes on the scene she cannot say
enough about him; and she conceives him apart from the Herakles of
Euripides. She paints in him, and Browning paints through her, the idea
of the full, the perfect man; and it is not the ideal of the cultivated,
of the sensitive folk. It is more also a woman's than a man's ideal.
For, now, suddenly, into the midst of the sorrow of the house, every one
wailing, life full of penury and inactivity, there leaps the "gay cheer
of a great voice," the full presence of the hero, his "weary happy
face, half god, half man, which made the god-part god the more." His
very voice, which smiled at sorrow, and his look, which, saying sorrow
was to be conquered, proclaimed to all the world "My life is in my hand
to give away, to make men glad," seemed to dry up all misery at its
source, for his love of man makes him always joyful. When Admetos opened
the house to him, and did not tell him of his wife's death, Balaustion
comments "The hero, all truth, took him at his word, and then strode off
to feast." He takes, she thought, the present rest, the physical food
and drink as frankly as he took the mighty labours of his fate. And she
rejoices as much in his jovial warmth, his joy in eating and drinking
and singing, and festivity, as in his heroic soul. They go together,
these things, in a hero.

Making the most o' the minute, that the soul
And body, strained to height a minute since,
Might lie relaxed in joy, this breathing space,
For man's sake more than ever;

He slew the pest of the marish, yesterday; to-day he takes his fill of
food, wine, song and flowers; to-morrow he will slay another plague of
mankind.

So she sings, praising aloud the heroic temper, as mighty in the natural
joys of natural life, in the strength and honour of the body, as in the
saving of the world from pain and evil. But this pleasure of the senses,
though in the great nature, is in it under rule, and the moment Herakles
hears of Alkestis dead, he casts aside, in "a splendour of resolve," the
feast, wine, song, and garlands, and girds himself to fight with Death
for her rescue And Balaustion, looking after him as he goes, cries out
the judgment of her soul on all heroism. It is Browning's judgment also,
one of the