setting which has
for its source a passage at the close of Plutarch's life of Nicias. The
favours bestowed by the Syracusans upon Athenian slaves and fugitives
who could delight them by reciting or singing the verses of Euripides is
not to be marvelled at, says Plutarch, "weying a reporte made of a ship
of the city of Caunus, that on a time being chased thether by pyrates,
thinking to save themselves within their portes, could not at the first
be received, but had repulse: howbeit being demaunded whether they could
sing any of Euripides songes, and aunswering that they could, were
straight suffered to enter, and come in."[109] From this root blossomed
Browning's romance of the Rhodian girl, who saves her country folk and
wins a lover and a husband by her delight in the poetry of one who was
more highly honoured abroad than in his own Athens. Perhaps Browning
felt that an ardent girl would be the best interpreter of the womanly
heroism and the pathos of "that strangest, saddest, sweetest song," of
Euripides. Of all its author's dramas the Alkestis is the most
appropriate to the occasion, for it is the poem of a great deliverance
from death, and here in effect it delivers from death, or worse, the
fugitives from the pirate-bark, "at destruction's very edge," who are
the suppliants to Syracuse. In accepting the task imposed upon him
Browning must have felt that no other play of Euripides could so
entirely have borne out the justice of the characterisation of the poet
by Mrs Browning in the lines which he prefixed to _Balaustions
Adventure_:

Our Euripides the human,
With his droppings of warm tears.

"If the Alkestis is not the masterpiece of the genius of Euripides,"
wrote Paul de Saint-Victor, "it is perhaps the masterpiece of his
heart."[110]

Balaustion herself, not a rose of "the Rosy Isle" but its
wild-pomegranate-flower, since amid the verdure of the tree "you shall
find food, drink, odour all at once," is Hellenic in her bright and
swift intelligence, her enthusiasm for all noble things of the mind, the
grace of every movement of her spirit, her culture and her beauty. The
atmosphere of the poem, which encircles the translation, is singularly
luminous and animating; the narrative of the adventure is rapid yet
always lucid; the verse leaps buoyantly like a wave of the sea.
Balaustion tells her tale to the four Greek girls, her companions, amid
the free things of nature, the overhanging grape vines, the r