t, when the book is
closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith
surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre
outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail.
Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of
power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests
with an air of allegorical abstraction the "Tower" and the "Turf," and
makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly
regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control.

The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north
coast of France,--this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport.
In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater
part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his
poems--_Aristophanes' Apology_ (published April 1875). It was not
Browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion,
the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting
for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier
"most delightful of May-month amusements" was perhaps not the less
easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted
woman-friend of his own. Balaustion is herself full ten years older than
at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has
ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not
only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest
assailant. Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. The
first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity;
the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic
elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic
world. Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. The glory of
Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many
points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to
so many root-ideas of Browning's own, that the reader hesitates between
the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom
his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of
"Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all
existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions,
who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic
phra