ial more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the
transmuting work of imagination has been already done. It is no accident
that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so
unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an
effective source of poetry. The poems of this decade form thus an odd
motley series--realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent,
Aeschylus and Euripides, the divine helper Herakles and the glorious
embodiment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and re-emerging
after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of Miranda or the Elder Man.
No inept legend for the Browning of this decade is the noble song of
Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly declaimed. "Earth's poet"
and "the heavenly Muse" are not allies, and they at times go different
ways.

_Herve Riel_ (published March 1871) is less characteristic of Browning
in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it
celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was
inspired. The French disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal
ties with France, and was sharing with his dearest French friend, Joseph
Milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman
fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of Sedan broke upon
them. Sympathy with the French sufferers induced Browning to do
violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to George Smith
for publication in _The Cornhill_. Most of its French readers doubtless
heard of Herve Riel, as well as of Robert Browning, for the first time.
His English readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of
their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits
of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets. But they
recognised the poet of _The Ring and the Book_, Herve has no touch of
Browning's "philosophy." He is none the less a true kinsman, in his
homely fashion, of Caponsacchi,--summoned in a supreme emergency for
which the appointed authorities have proved unequal.

A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him.
_Balaustion's Adventure_ was, as the charming dedication tells us, the
most delightful of May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which
enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, we still feel the thrill
of the deadly conflict; the agony of France may be partly divined in the
agony of Athens. Thirty years before,