ess of spirit with which he
confronts the meticulous and perfunctory mourning of the stricken
household reflected his own habitual temper with peculiar vividness. But
it is clear that the Euripidean story contained an element which
Browning could not assimilate--Admetos' acceptance of Alkestis'
sacrifice. To the Greek the action seemed quite in order; the persons
who really incurred his reproof were Admetos' parents, who in spite of
their advanced years refused to anticipate their approaching death in
their son's favour. Browning cannot away with an Admetos who, from sheer
reluctance to die, allowed his wife to suffer death in his place; and he
characteristically suggests a version of the story in which its issues
are determined from first to last, and on both sides, by
self-sacrificing love. Admetos is now the large-minded king who grieves
to be called away before his work for his people is done. Alkestis
seeks, with Apollo's leave, to take his place, so that her lord may live
and carry out the purposes of his soul,--

"Nor let Zeus lose the monarch meant in thee."

But Admetos will not allow this; for Alkestis is as spirit to his flesh,
and his life without her would be but a passive death. To which "pile of
truth on truth" she rejoins by adding the "one truth more," that his
refusal of her sacrifice would be in effect a surrender of the supreme
duty laid upon him of reigning a righteous king,--that this life-purpose
of his is above joy and sorrow, and the death which she will undergo for
his and its sake, her highest good as it is his. And in effect, her
death, instead of paralysing him, redoubles the vigour of his soul, so
that Alkestis, living on in a mind made better by her presence, has not
in the old tragic sense died at all, and finds her claim to enter Hades
rudely rejected by "the pensive queen o' the twilight," for whom death
meant just to die, and wanders back accordingly to live once more by
Admetos' side. Such the story became when the Greek dread of death was
replaced by Browning's spiritual conception of a death glorified by
love. The pathos and tragic forces of it were inevitably enfeebled; no
Herakles was needed to pluck this Alkestis from the death she sought,
and the rejection of her claim to die is perilously near to Lucianic
burlesque. But, simply as poetry, the joyous sun-like radiance of the
mighty spoiler of death is not unworthily replaced by the twilight
queen, whose eyes