divinity stretching forth a
helping hand to man. The noble "idyl" of _Echetlos_ is thus a
counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and
Alkestis. Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at
Marathon,

"clearing Greek earth of weed
As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede,"

is one of the many figures which thrill us with Browning's passion for
Greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in
his nature often to communicate. But the great successes of the
_Dramatic Idyls_ are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely
human kind that Browning had been used to tell. _Pheidippides_ belongs
to the heroic line of _How they brought the Good News_ and _Herve Riel_.
The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable
critical moment, upon which so much of Browning's psychology converges,
is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in _Clive_ and _Martin
Relph_. And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always
implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last
decade--the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul
and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. The two
worlds--inner and outer--fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of
self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent
illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse--painted with a few
strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am
now, you man that I used to be!'--is beyond the comprehension of the
friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his
auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh
equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and
the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the
conclusion which for Ivan had been the merest matter of fact from the
first. Admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy
debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he
sits cutting out a toy for his children:--

"They told him he was free
As air to walk abroad; 'How otherwise?' asked he."

With the "wild men" Halbert and Hob it is the spell of a sudden memory
which makes an abrupt rift between the men they have seemed to be and
the men they prove. Browning in his earlier days had