lost. In that one
moment his true soul, with its instinctive selfishness, has leapt to
light, and the knowledge of it torments him with an inextinguishable
agony. In _Ivan Ivanovitch_ (founded on a popular Russian story of a
woman throwing her children to the wolves to save her own life) we have
a twofold illustration of the theme. The testing-moment comes to the
mother, Louscha, and again to Ivan Ivanovitch. While the woman fails
terribly in her duty, and meets a terrible reward, the man rises to a
strange and awful nobility of action, and "acts for God." _Halbert and
Hob_, a grim little tragedy (suggested by a passage in the Nicomachean
Ethics of Aristotle), presents us with the same idea in a singularly
concrete form. The crisis has a saving effect, but it is an incomplete,
an unwilling or irresistible, act of grace, and it bears but sorry
fruit. In _Ned Bratts_ (suggested by the story of "Old Tod," in Bunyan's
_Life and Death of Mr. Badman_[55]) we have a prompt and quite hurried
taking of the tide: the sudden conversion, repentance, and expiation of
the "worst couple, rogue and quean, unhanged." _Pheidippides_ (the
legend of the runner who brought the news of Marathon to Athens, and
died in the utterance) illustrates the idea in a more obvious but less
individual way.

Perhaps for sheer perfection of art, for fundamental tragedy, for a
quality of compassionate and unflinching imaginative vision, nothing in
the book quite comes up to _Halbert and Hob_. There is hardly in
Browning a more elemental touch than that of: "A boy threw stones: he
picked them up and stored them in his breast." _Martin Relph_, besides
being a fine tale splendidly told, is among the most masterly of all
renderings of remorse, of the terrors and torments of conscience. Every
word is like a drop of agony wrung out of a tortured soul. _Ivan
Ivanovitch_ is, as a narrative, still finer: as a piece of story-telling
Browning has perhaps never excelled it. Nothing could be more graphic
and exciting than the description of the approach of the wolves: the
effective change from iambs to anapaests gives their very motion.

"Was that--wind?
Anyhow, Droug starts, stops, back go his ears, he snuffs,
Snorts,--never such a snort! then plunges, knows the sough's
Only the wind: yet, no--our breath goes up too straight!
Still the low sound,--less low, loud, louder, at a rate
There's no mistaking more! Shall I lean out--lo