ich the cavilling reader might
excusably regard as a fulfilment of this jocose threat. For the
translation of the _Agamemnon_ (1877) was not in any sense a serious
contribution to the English knowledge and love of Greek drama. The
Balaustion "transcripts" had betrayed an imperfect sensibility to the
finer qualities of Greek dramatic style. But Browning seems to have gone
to work upon the greatest of antique tragedies with the definite
intention of showing, by a version of literal fidelity, how little the
Greek drama at its best owed to Greek speech. And he has little
difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and
his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very
interesting and instructive to the student of Browning's mind. Nowhere
else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic
intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets
the heart and the conscience of nations. His acute individualism in
effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a
parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by
one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation.

[Footnote 61: It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his
restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of
AEschylus. It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.]

The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive. The summer holiday
was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the
familiar stimulus of the sea-air. But the early autumn brought an event
which abruptly shattered his quiescence, and called forth, presently,
the most intimately personal poem of his later years. Miss Ann
Egerton-Smith, his gifted and congenial companion at London concerts,
and now, for the fourth year in succession, in the summer
_villeggiatura_, died suddenly of heart disease at dawn on Sept. 14, as
she was preparing for a mountain expedition with her friends. It was not
one of those losses which stifle thought or sweep it along on the
vehement tide of lyric utterance; it was rather of the kind which set it
free, creating an atmosphere of luminous serenity about it, and allaying
all meaner allurements and distractions. Elegy is often the outcome of
such moods; and the elegiac note is perceptible in the grave music of
_La Saisiaz_. Yet the poem as a whole does not even distantly recall,
save i