n the furrow and flashes into the harvest; and
it is his glory to be obscured for ever by his deed--"the great deed
ne'er grows small." Browning's development of the Vergilian myth--"si
credere dignum est"--of Pan and Luna astonishes by its vehement
sensuousness and its frank chastity; and while the beauty of the
Girl-moon and the terror of her betrayal are realised with the utmost
energy of imagination, we are made to feel that all which happens is the
transaction of a significant dream or legend.

In contrast with these classical pieces, _Halbert and Hob_ reads like a
fragment from some Scandinavian saga telling of the life of forlorn and
monstrous creatures, cave-dwellers, who are less men than beasts. Yet
father and son are indeed men; the remorse which checks the last outrage
against paternity is the touch of the finger of God upon human hearts;
and though old Halbert sits dead,

With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting face,

and young Hob henceforth goes tottering, muttering, mumbling with a
mindless docility, they are, like Browning's men of the Paris morgue,
only "apparent failures"; there was in them that spark of divine
illumination which can never be wholly extinguished. Positive misdeeds,
the presence of a wild crew of evil passions, do not suffice to make
Browning's faith or hope falter. It is the absence of human virtue which
appals him; if the salt have lost its savour wherewith shall it be
salted? This it is which condemns to a swift, and what the poem
represents as a just, abolishment from earth the mother who in _Ivan
Ivanovitch_ has given her children to the wolves, and has thereby proved
the complete nullity of her womanhood. For her there is no possible
redemption; she must cease to cumber the ground. Ivan acts merely as the
instinctive doomsman of Nature or of God, and the old village Pope, who,
as the veil of life grows thin, is feeling after the law above human
law, justifies the wielder of the axe, which has been no instrument of
vengeance but simply an exponent of the wholesome vitality of earth. The
objection that carpenters and joiners, who assume the Heraklean task of
purging the earth of monsters, must be prepared to undergo a period of
confinement at the pleasure of the Czar in a Criminal Lunatic Asylum is
highly sensible, and wholly inappropriate, belonging, as it does, to a
plane of thought and feeling other than that in which the poem moves.
But perhaps it is not a