easily revived in these weeks of constant companionship with a devoted
woman-friend of his own. Balaustion is herself full ten years older than
at the time of her first adventure; her fresh girlish enthusiasm has
ripened into the ardent conviction of intellectual maturity; she can not
only cite Euripides, but vindicate his art against his mightiest
assailant. Situation, scenery, language, are here all more complex. The
first Adventure was almost Greek in its radiant and moving simplicity;
the last is Titanically Browningesque, a riot of the least Hellenic
elements of Browning's mind with the uptorn fragments of the Hellenic
world. Moreover, the issue is far from being equally clear. The glory of
Euripides is still the ostensible theme; but Aristophanes had so many
points of contact with Browning himself, and appeals in his defence to
so many root-ideas of Browning's own, that the reader hesitates between
the poet to whom Browning's imagination allied him, and the poet whom
his taste preferred. His Aristophanes is, like himself, the poetry of
"Life," a broad and generous realist, who like Lippo Lippi draws all
existence into his art; an enemy of all asceticisms and abstractions,
who drives his meaning home through vivid concrete example and drastic
phrase, rather than by enunciating the impressive moral commonplaces of
tragic poetry.[59] Aristophanes, too, had been abused for his
"unintelligible" poetry,--"mere psychologic puzzling,"[60]--by a
"chattering" public which preferred the lilt of nursery rhymes. The
magnificent portrait of Aristophanes is conceived in the very spirit of
the riotous exuberance of intellect and senses--

"Mind a-wantoning
At ease of undisputed mastery
Over the body's brood"--

which was so congenial to the realist in Browning; "the clear