e Browning
enthusiast, who is not responsible for his fervour, will assert that
either the jest or the frankly cynical moral of _Pietro of Abano_
compensates for the jolting in a springless waggon over a rough road and
a long. We make the acquaintance of a magician who with knowledge
uninspired by love has kicks and cuffs for his reward, and the
acquaintance of an astute Greek, who, at least in his dream of life,
imposed upon him by the art of magic, exploits the talents of his friend
Pietro, and gains the prize of his astuteness, having learnt to rule men
by the potent spell of "cleverness uncurbed by conscience." The
cynicism is only inverted morality, and implies that the writer is the
reverse of cynical; but it lacks the attractive sub-acid flavour of a
delicate cynicism, which insinuates its prophylactic virus into our
veins, and the humour of the poem, ascending from stage to stage until
we reach Pietro's final failure, is cumbrous and mechanical.

The two series of _Dramatic Idyls_ included some conspicuous successes.
The classical poems _Pheidippides_, _Echetlos_, _Pan and Luna_, idyls
heroic and mythological, invite us by their beauty to return to them
again and again. Browning's sympathy with gallantry in action, with
self-devotion to a worthy cause, was never more vividly rendered than in
the first of these poems. The runner of Athens is a more graceful
brother of the Breton sailor who saved a fleet for France; but the
vision of majestical Pan in "the cool of a cleft" exalts our human
heroism into relation with the divine benevolence, and the reward of
release from labour is proportionally higher than a holiday with the
"belle Aurore." Victory and then domestic love is the human
interpretation of Pan's oracular promise; but the gifts of the gods are
better than our hopes and it proves to be victory and death:

He flung down his shield,
Ran like fire once more: and the space 'twixt the Fennel-field
And Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs through,
Till in he broke: "Rejoice, we conquer!" Like wine through clay,
Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died--the bliss!

The companion poem of Marathon, the story of the nameless clown, the
mysterious holder of the ploughshare, is not less inspiring. The unknown
champion, so plain in his heroic magnitude of mind, so brilliant as he
flashes in the van, in the rear, is like the incarnated genius of the
soil, which hides itself i