ries, "bear me away--wind, wave and bark!" But
Browning does not leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her
heart. He gives her the spiritual passion of genius. She is swept beyond
her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the gods,
with the pure Ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life
awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see Euripides. In these high
thoughts she will outlive her sorrow.

Why should despair be? Since, distinct above
Man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind
And floats the cloud, free transport for our soul
Out of its fleshly durance dim and low,--
Since disembodied soul anticipates
(Thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint)
Above all crowding, crystal silentness,
Above all noise, a silver solitude:--
Surely, where thought so bears soul, soul in time
May permanently bide, "assert the wise,"
There live in peace, there work in hope once more--
O nothing doubt, Philemon! Greed and strife,
Hatred and cark and care, what place have they
In yon blue liberality of heaven?
How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise
Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!
Heaven, earth and sea, my warrant--in their name,
Believe--o'er falsehood, truth is surely sphered,
O'er ugliness beams beauty, o'er this world
Extends that realm where, "as the wise assert,"
Philemon, thou shalt see Euripides
Clearer than mortal sense perceived the man!

We understand that she has drunk deep of Socrates, that her spiritual
sense reached onward to the Platonic Socrates. In this supersensuous
world of thought she is quieted out of the weakness which made her
miserable over the fall of Athens; and in the quiet, Browning, who will
lift his favourite into perfectness, adds to her spiritual imagination
the dignity of that moral judgment which the intellect of genius gathers
from the facts of history. In spite of her sorrow, she grasps the truth
that there was justice in the doom of Athens. Let justice have its way.
Let the folk die who pulled her glory down. This is her prophetic
strain, the strength of the Hebrew in the Greek.

And then the prophet in the woman passes, and the poet in her takes the
lyre. She sees the splendid sunset. Why should its extravagance of glory
run to waste? Let me build out of it a new Athens, quarry out the golden
clouds and raise the Acropolis, and th