contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and
those who aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these
Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the
poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story
which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand nor
vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in
dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara's harangue to the
Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her
generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her
individual variety of it--the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet
calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from
the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, but, when the book is
closed, what we seem to see in it is not the fantastical goldsmith
surveying the motives of his life, but Browning filling in the bizarre
outlines of his construction with appropriate psychological detail.
Another symptom of decline in Browning's most characteristic kind of
power is probably to be found in the play of symbolism which invests
with an air of allegorical abstraction the "Tower" and the "Turf," and
makes the whole poem, with all its prosaic realism, intelligibly
regarded as a sort of fantasia on self-indulgence and self-control.

The summer retreat of 1874 was found once more on the familiar north
coast of France,--this time at the quiet hamlet of Mers, near Treport.
In this lonely place, with scarcely a book at hand, he wrote the greater
part of the most prodigally and exuberantly learned of all his
poems--_Aristophanes' Apology_ (published April 1875). It was not
Browning's way to repeat his characters, but the story of Balaustion,
the brilliant girl devotee of Euripides, had proved an admirable setting
for his interpretations of Greek drama; and the charm of that earlier
"most delightful of May-month amusements" was perhaps not the less