is powerful rival in popular favour, and of awing him into
sobriety and becoming manners; with an instinctive avoidance she recoils
from whatever is gross or uncomely; yet she can do honour to the true
light of intellect and genius even though it shines through earth-born
vapours and amid base surroundings.

Athens, "the life and light of the whole world," has sunk under the
power of Sparta, and it can be henceforth no home for Balaustion and her
Euthukles. The bark that bears them is bounding Rhodesward, and the
verse has in it the leap and race of the prow. Balaustion, stricken at
heart, yet feels that this tragedy of Athens brings the tragic
katharsis; the justice of the gods is visible in it; and above man's
wickedness and folly she reaches to "yon blue liberality of heaven." It
seems as if the spirit which might have saved Athens is that of the
loins girt and the lamp lit which was embodied in the strenuous devotion
of Euripides to the highest things; and the spirit which has brought
Athens to its ruin is that expressed with a splendid power through the
work of Aristophanes. But Aristophanes shall plead for himself and leave
nothing unsaid that can serve to vindicate him as a poet and even as a
moralist Thus only can truth in the end stand clear, assured of its
supremacy over falsehood and over half-truth.

Nothing that Browning has written is more vividly imagined than the
encounter of Balaustion with Aristophanes and his crew of revellers on
the night when the tidings of the death of Euripides reached Athens; it
rouses and controls the feelings with the tumult of life and the
sanctity of death, while also imposing itself on the eye as a brilliant
and a solemn picture. The revellers scatter before the presence of
Balaustion, and she and the great traducer of Euripides stand face to
face. Nowhere else has Browning presented this conception of the man of
vast disorderly genius, who sees and approves the better way and
splendidly follows the worse:

Such domineering deity
Hephaistos might have carved to cut the brine
For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path
Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror.

It is as if male force, with the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh,
and the pride of life behind it, were met and held in check by the finer
feminine force resting for its support upon the divine laws. But in
truth Aristophanes is half on the side of Balaustion and of Euripides;
he must, in