which no outpouring could
tinge the paleness or fill the blank of eternity, the power of love
which transforms their earthly homes, their

... hopes and fears, so blind and yet so sweet
With death about them." (p. 115.)

"Balaustion" means wild pomegranate flower; and the girl has been so
called on account of her lyric gifts. She recalls the pomegranate tree,
because its leaves are cooling to the brow, its seed and blossom
grateful to the sense, and because the nightingale is never distant from
it. She will keep the name for life--so she tells her friends--and with
it a better thing which her songs have gained her. One youth came daily
to the temple-steps at Syracuse to hear her. He was at her side at
Athens when she landed. They will be married at this next full moon.

"Alkestis" failed "to get the prize" when its author was competing with
Sophocles. "But Euripides has had his reward: in the sympathies which he
has stirred; in the genius which he has inspired. His crown came direct
from Zeus."

We need not name the poetess whom Mr. Browning quotes at the close of
this poem. The painter so generously eulogized is F. Leighton.

When we meet Balaustion again, in "Aristophanes' Apology," many things
have happened. She has seen her poet in his retirement (this was
mentioned in her "adventure"), kissed his hand, and received from it,
together with other gifts, his tragedy of Herakles. Euripides has died;
Athens has fallen; and Balaustion, with her memories in her heart, and
her husband, Euthykles, by her side, is speeding back towards Rhodes.
She is deeply shocked by the fate of her adoptive city, to which her
fancy pays a tribute of impassioned reverence, too poetic to be given in
any but Mr. Browning's words. Yet she has a growing belief that that
fate was just. Sea and air and the blue expanse of heaven are full of
suggestion of that spirit-life, with its larger struggles or its
universal peace, which is above the world's crowd and noise. And she
determines that sorrow for what is fleeting shall not gnaw at her heart.

But in order to overcome the sorrow, she must loosen it from her. The
tragedy she has witnessed must enact itself once more for Euthykles and
her, he writing as she dictates. It will have for prologue a second
adventure of her own, which he also has witnessed; and this adventure
will constitute the book. It is prefaced in its turn by a backward
glance at the circumstances, (