revellers, to announce
the death of Euripides.

Secondly, there is the presentation of Aristophanes. Browning has
created him for us--

And no ignoble presence! On the bulge
Of the clear baldness,--all his head one brow,--
True, the veins swelled, blue network, and there surged
A red from cheek to temple,--then retired
As if the dark-leaved chaplet damped a flame,--
Was never nursed by temperance or health.
But huge the eyeballs rolled back native fire,
Imperiously triumphant: nostrils wide
Waited their incense; while the pursed mouth's pout
Aggressive, while the beak supreme above,
While the head, face, nay, pillared throat thrown back,
Beard whitening under like a vinous foam,
There made a glory, of such insolence--
I thought,--such domineering deity
Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path
Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.
Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps,
But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed:
Still, sensuality was grown a rite.

We see the man, the natural man, to the life. But as the poem goes on,
we company with his intellect and soul, with the struggle of sensualism
against his knowledge of a more ideal life; above all, with one, who
indulging the appetites and senses of the natural man, is yet, at a
moment, their master. The coarse chambers of his nature are laid bare,
his sensuous pleasure in the lower forms of human life, his joy in
satirising them, his contempt for the good or the ideal life if it throw
the sensual man away. Then, we are made to know the power he has to rise
above this--without losing it--into the higher imaginative region where,
for the time, he feels the genius of Sophocles, Euripides, the moral
power of Balaustion, and the beauty of the natural world. Indeed, in
that last we find him in his extant plays. Few of the Greeks could write
with greater exquisiteness of natural beauty than this wild poet who
loved the dunghill. And Browning does not say this, but records in this
_Apology_ how when Aristophanes is touched for an instant by
Balaustion's reading of the _Herakles_, and seizing the psalterion sings
the song of Thamuris marching to his trial with the Muses through a
golden autumn morning--it is the glory and loveliness of nature that he
sings. This portraiture of the poet is scattered through the whole poem.
It is too minute,