se, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of
tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his
"unintelligible" poetry,--"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]--by a
"chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The
magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of
the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses--

"Mind a-wantoning
At ease of undisputed mastery
Over the body's brood"--

which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; "the clear
baldness--all his head one brow"--and the surging flame of red from
cheek to temple; the huge eyeballs rolling back native fire, imperiously
triumphant, the "pursed mouth's pout aggressive," and "the beak supreme
above," "beard whitening under like a vinous foam."

[Footnote 59: _Arist. Ap._, p. 698.]

[Footnote 60: Ib., p. 688.]

Balaustion is herself the first to recognise the divinity shrouded in
this half satyr-like form: in some of the finest verses of the poem she
compares him to the sea-god, whom as a child she had once seen peer

"large-looming from his wave,

* * * * *

A sea-worn face, sad as mortality,
Divine with yearning after fellowship,"

while below the surface all was "tail splash, frisk of fin." And when
Balaustion has recited her poet's masterpiece of tragic pathos,
Aristophanes lays aside the satirist a moment and attests his affinity
to the divine poets by the noble song of Thamyris. The "transcript from
Euripides" itself is quite secondary in interest to this vivid and
powerful dramatic framework. Far from being a vital element in the
action, like the recital of the _Alkestis_, the reading of the _Hercules
Furens_ is an almost gratuitous diversion in the midst of the talk; and
the tameness of a literal (often awkwardly literal) translation is
rarely broken by those inrushes of alien genius which are the glory of
Browning's _Alkestis_. Yet the very self-restraint sprang probably from
Browning's deep sensibility to the pathos of the story. "Large tears,"
as Mrs Orr has told us, fell from his eyes, and emotion choked his
voice, when he first read it aloud to her.

The _Inn Album_ is, like _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, a versified
novel, melodramatic in circumstances, frankly familiar in scenery and
atmosphere. Once more, as in the _Blot in the 'Scutcheon_, and in _James
Lee's Wife_, Browning turned f