r in which I would he had oftener written. To read it
is to regret that, being able to do this, he chose rather to write, from
time to time, as if he were hewing his way through tangled underwood. No
lovelier image of Proserpina has been made in poetry, not even in
Tennyson's _Demeter_, than this--

And even while it lay, i' the look of him,
Dead, the dimmed body, bright Alkestis' soul
Had penetrated through the populace
Of ghosts, was got to Kore,--throned and crowned
The pensive queen o' the twilight, where she dwells
Forever in a muse, but half away
From flowery earth she lost and hankers for,--
And there demanded to become a ghost
Before the time.
Whereat the softened eyes
Of the lost maidenhood that lingered still
Straying among the flowers in Sicily,
Sudden was startled back to Hades' throne
By that demand: broke through humanity
Into the orbed omniscience of a God,
Searched at a glance Alkestis to the soul
And said ...
"Hence, thou deceiver! This is not to die,
If, by the very death which mocks me now,
The life, that's left behind and past my power,
Is formidably doubled ..."
And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,
The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;
And lo, Alkestis was alive again,
And of Admetos' rapture who shall speak?

The old conception has more reality. This is in the vague world of
modern psychical imagination. Nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it
enlarges Browning's picture of the character of Balaustion.

Her character is still further enlarged in _Aristophanes' Apology_. That
poem, if we desire intellectual exercise, illuminated by flashings of
imagination, is well worth reading, but to comprehend it fully, one must
know a great deal of Athenian life and of the history of the Comic
Drama. It is the defence by Aristophanes of his idea of the business,
the method, and the use of Comedy. How far what he says is Browning
speaking for Aristophanes, and how far it is Browning speaking for
himself, is hard to tell. And it would please him to leave that
purposely obscure. What is alive and intense in the poem is, first, the
realisation of Athenian life in several scenes, pictured with all
Browning's astonishing force of presentation, as, for instance, the
feast after the play, and the grim entrance of Sophocles, black from
head to foot, among the glittering and drunken