roism as _Herve Riel_, and told in as ringing verse. The versing of
_Echetlos_, its rugged, rousing sound, its movement, are in most
excellent harmony with the image of the rude, giant "Holder of the
ploughshare," who at Marathon drove his furrows through the Persians and
rooted up the Mede. Browning has gathered into one picture and one sound
the whole spirit of the story. _Pan and Luna_ is a bold re-rendering of
the myth that Vergil enshrines, and the greater part of it is of such
poetic freshness that I think it must be a waif from the earlier years
of his poetry. Nor is there better imaginative work in his descriptive
poetry than the image of the naked moon, in virginal distress, flying
for refuge through the gazing heaven to the succourable cloud--fleece on
fleece of piled-up snow, drowsily patient--where Pan lay in ambush for
her beauty.

Among these more gracious idyls, one of singular rough power tells the
ghastly tale of the mother who gave up her little children to the wolves
to save herself. Browning liked this poem, and the end he added to the
story--how the carpenter, Ivan, when the poor frightened woman
confessed, lifted his axe and cut off her head; how he knew that he did
right, and was held to have done right by the village and its pope. The
sin by which a mother sacrificed the lives of her children to save her
own was out of nature: the punishment should be outside of ordinary law.
It is a piteous tale, and few things in Browning equal the horror of the
mother's vain attempt to hide her crime while she confesses it. Nor does
he often show greater imaginative skill in metrical movement than when
he describes in galloping and pattering verse the grey pack emerging
from the forest, their wild race for the sledge, and their demon leader.

The other idyls in these two volumes are full of interest for those who
care for psychological studies expressed in verse. What the vehicle of
verse does for them is to secure conciseness and suggestiveness in the
rendering of remote, daring, and unexpected turns of thought and
feeling, and especially of conscience. Yet the poems themselves cannot
be called concise. Their subjects are not large enough, nor indeed
agreeable enough, to excuse their length. Goethe would have put them
into a short lyrical form. It is impossible not to regret, as we read
them, the Browning of the _Dramatic Lyrics_. Moreover, some of them are
needlessly ugly. _Halbert and Hob_--and in _Jocoseri