tragedy, so unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an effective source of poetry.  The poems of this decade form thus an odd motley series—­realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent, Aeschylus and Euripides, the divine helper Herakles and the glorious embodiment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and re-emerging after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of Miranda or the Elder Man.  No inept legend for the Browning of this decade is the noble song of Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly declaimed.  “Earth’s poet” and “the heavenly Muse” are not allies, and they at times go different ways.

Herve Riel (published March 1871) is less characteristic of Browning in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was inspired.  The French disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal ties with France, and was sharing with his dearest French friend, Joseph Milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of Sedan broke upon them.  Sympathy with the French sufferers induced Browning to do violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to George Smith for publication in The Cornhill.  Most of its French readers doubtless heard of Herve Riel, as well as of Robert Browning, for the first time.  His English readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets.  But they recognised the poet of The Ring and the Book, Herve has no touch of Browning’s “philosophy.”  He is none the less a true kinsman, in his homely fashion, of Caponsacchi,—­summoned in a supreme emergency for which the appointed authorities have proved unequal.

A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him. Balaustion’s Adventure was, as the charming dedication tells us, the most delightful of May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, we still feel the thrill of the deadly conflict; the agony of France may be partly divined in the agony of Athens.  Thirty years before, he had shown, in the noble fragmentary “prologue” to a Hippolytus (Artemis Prologizes), a command of the majestic, reticent manner of Greek tragedy sufficiently remarkable in one whose natural instincts of expression were far more Elizabethan than Greek.  The incongruity of Greek dramatic methods with his own seems to have speedily checked his progress; but Euripides, the author of the Greek Hippolytus, retained a peculiar fascination for him, and it was on another Euripidean drama that he now, in the fulness of his powers, set his hand.  The result certainly does not diminish our sense of the incongruity.  Keenly as he admired the humanity and pathos of Euripides, he challenges