grotesque posturing, or intellectualised anecdotage. The _Dramatic
Idyls_ of 1879 and 1880 showed that these more serious forebodings were
at least premature. There was little enough in them, no doubt, of the
qualities traditionally connected with "idyll." Browning habitually wore
his rue with a difference, and used familiar terms in senses of his own.
There is nothing here of "enchanted reverie" or leisurely pastoralism.
Browning's "idyls" are studies in life's moments of stress and strain,
not in its secluded pleasances and verdurous wooded ways. It is for the
most part some new variation of his familiar theme--the soul taken in
the grip of a tragic crisis, and displaying its unsuspected deeps and
voids. Not all are of this kind, however; and while his keenness for
intense and abnormal effects is as pronounced as ever, he seeks them in
an even more varied field. Italy, the main haunt of his song, yields--it
can hardly be said to have inspired--one only of the _Idyls_--_Pietro of
Abano_. Old memories of Russia are furbished up in _Iván Ivánovitch_,
odd gatherings from the byways of England and America in _Ned Bratts,
Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph_; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating
lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with
his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of
nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative
device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in _Gerard de
Lairesse_, a superb example of what he rejected. In all mythology there
was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was
most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a
helping hand to man. The noble "idyl" of _Echetlos_ is thus a
counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and
Alkestis. Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at
Marathon,

"clearing Greek earth of weed