Marathon to Athens to tell the result of the battle. The earlier feat is recorded by Herodotus, and referred to by other writers, together with the ambiguous reply of Sparta, and the meeting with Pan at Mount Parnes, and receiving from him a promise of assistance. Lucian mentions the death of the messenger in the act of announcing the victory. Mr. Browning has filled in this outline of semi-mythical fact, and placed Pheidippides before us, not only in the passion of his patriotic impulse, but in all that poetry of visible motion with which the Greek imagination would have clothed him.

Archons of Athens, topped by the tettix, see, I return!

See, 'tis myself here standing alive, no spectre that speaks!
Crowned with the myrtle, did you command me, Athens and you,
"Run, Pheidippides, run and race, reach Sparta for aid!

Persia has come, we are here, where is She?" Your command I obeyed,
Ran and raced like stubble, some field which a fire runs through,
Was the space between city and city: two days, two nights did I burn
Over the hills, under the dales, down pits and up peaks.

:

Into their midst I broke breath served but for "Persia has come !
Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water and earth;

Razed to the ground is Eretria—but Athens, shall Athens sink,

Drop into dust and die-the flower of Hellas utterly die,

Die, with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid, the stander-by?
Answer me quick, what help, what hand do you stretch o'er destruction's
brink?

How, when? No care for my limbs !—there's lightning in all and some―
Fresh and fit your message to bear, once lips give it birth!"

I stood

O my Athens-Sparta love thee? Did Sparta respond?
Every face of her leered in a furrow of envy, mistrust,
Malice, each eye of her gave me its glitter of gratified hate!
Gravely they turned to take counsel, to cast for excuses.
Quivering, the limbs of me fretting as fire frets, an inch from dry wood:
"Persia has come, Athens asks aid, and still they debate?
Thunder, thou Zeus! Athene, are Spartans a quarry beyond

Swing of thy spear? Phoibos and Artemis, clang them 'Ye must!'"

No bolt launched from Olumpos? Lo, their answer at last!
"Has Persia come,-does Athens ask aid,—may Sparta befriend?
Nowise precipitate judgment-too weighty the issue at stake!
Count we no time lost time which lags through respect to the Gods!
Ponder that precept of old, 'No warfare, whatever the odds
In your favour, so long as the moon, half-orbed, is unable to take
Full-circle her state in the sky!' Already she rounds to it fast:
Athens must wait, patient as we-who judgment suspend."

Athens, except for that sparkle,-thy name, I had mouldered to ash!
That sent a blaze through my blood; off, off and away was I back,
-Not one word to waste, one look to lose on the false and the vile!
Yet "O Gods of my land !" I cried, as each hillock and plain,
Wood and stream, I knew, named, rushing past them again,
"Have ye kept faith, proved mindful of honours we paid you
Vain was the filleted victim, the fulsome libation! Too rash
Love in its choice, paid you so largely service so slack!"

erewhile?

The beautiful imagery which illustrates the first race is repeated in the second.

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.

The metre itself, which Mr. Browning employs for the first time,
denotes this blending of athletic force and heroic inspiration, and seems
to throb with the unresting flight and rythmic footfall of the "day-
long runner" who runs for his country's life.
An element of more
personal interest is supplied by the hope which speeds Pheidippides on
his last errand. Pan has promised him release from "the racer's toil,"
and he can only construe such a release into freedom to marry the
maiden whom he loves; but the promise is more poetically fulfilled in
the death which overtakes him in the hour of his crowning achievement
and of his country's triumph; the heart bursting as from excess of joy.
The "Rejoice" which is his dying salutation to the Archons, and its
consequent adoption in memory of the event, belong to the historic basis.
of the story.
The Greek conception appears to us too strictly
maintained in the first verse, where an invocation to Pan is per-
plexingly involved with an address to the other gods; while towards
the end of the poem its rounded cadences here and there break up into
pants, like the action of a mechanism of which the spring is broken.
But on the whole the language is singularly little strained by its
adaptation to classic thought; and its majestic body of sound conveys
a simplicity of meaning very rarely found under like conditions. Mr.
Browning's known dramatic faculty of so paving the way to his climax
that our utmost surprise has in it a sense of the inevitable, has a
ready-made expression in this series of incidents, creating as they do a
tension of feeling to which the catastrophe is at once a shock and a
relief; but it makes its own subjects in the other Idylls, and is the
more apparent in proportion as their psychological interest is more pro-
nounced. The most striking instance of this kind of effect occurs in
"Martin Relph."

occurrence.

"Martin Relph" is the confession of an old man guilty in his youth of witnessing a judicial murder, which a signal from him might have prevented, and who ever since has striven to exorcise the memory of the fact by rehearsing it publicly at the place and on the anniversary of its This rehearsal, sobbed forth in a mingled stream of narrative, ejaculation, and protest is the echo of an anguish deeper even than its ostensible cause; and its last words flash a sudden, yet expected meaning upon it. The man's soul is wrestling, not with the memory of a deed, but with the phantom of a motive. He brands himself as fool and coward for what he has done; but the terms fool and coward are only the weapons with which he fights off the thought, too clamorous to be silenced, too terrible to be distinctly expressed, that he was something more. He liked, perhaps loved, the condemned girl.

Living, she would have belonged to another man. That very man was
flying towards the place of execution, staggering, stumbling, straining
every nerve, waving aloft the signal of her attested innocence; without
voice to cry, without an eye to see him but his who faced the assembled
crowd. Was it simple horror which struck that one witness dumb within
sight of the pinioned victim, and the terrified lookers-on, the levelled
muskets, and the already present reprieve, through the brief, breathless,
ultra-conscious moment which determined the destiny of two lives?
From head to foot in a serpent's twine am I tightened: I touch ground?
No more than a gibbet's rigid corpse which the fetters rust around!
Can I speak, can I breathe, can I burst-aught else but see, see, only see?
And see I do-for there comes in sight—a man, it sure must be !—
Who staggeringly, stumblingly, rises, falls, rises, at random flings his weight
On and on, anyhow onward-a man that's mad he arrives too late!

Else why does he wave a something white high-flourished above his head?
Why does not he call, cry,-curse the fool!-why throw up his arms instead?
O take this fist in your own face, fool! Why does not yourself shout “ Stay!
Here's a man comes rushing, might and main, with something he's mad to say?"
And a minute, only a moment, to have hell-fire boil up in your brain,
And ere you can judge things right, choose heaven,-time's over, repentance vain!

Mr. Browning has thrown not only all his power into this situation, but all his subtlety into the open verdict which is our final impression of it. He does not indeed imply that the jealousy at once confessed and disclaimed is what the narrator tries to think it—a figment of his own brain, born of the ingenuity of a terrified remorse; but he allows the very circumstances of the event to justify a doubt if that feeling could be held responsible. We may at least imagine that the latent motive triumphed, if triumph it did, through the fact of its indistinctness; though memory, which knows no perspective but its own, might reject the compromise. The episode refers to some troublous period of the last century, of which one or two passages reflect the coarse moral tone, as well as the social and political disorder which rendered it possible. A regiment is quartered in a village. Its intended movements have become known to the enemy. Treason is suspected; an example,―in other words, a victim required. This is found in the person of an innocent girl whose letter to her affianced husband is captured, and distorted into an evidence of guilt. She is sentenced to die unless her loyalty be established within a week. The burden of proof falls on the lover, and no figure in the drama is so pathetic as this man struggling against every hindrance which selfishness and stupidity can devise for the official acknowledgment of that which nobody disbelieves; and whose maddest endeavours only bring him to the side of the woman he would have saved in time to die with her. When the smoke of the united volley clears away, the frantic figure has disappeared. It is found face downwards in a field still half a mile distant; the hand clenching its signed and sealed paper; some blood about the lips. The mortal

agony of this retrospect is nowhere more fully expressed than in the lines which tells us that it is over.

So, coward it is and coward shall be! There's a friend, now! Thanks! A drink Of water I wanted: and now I can walk, get home by myself, I think.

Like "Martin Relph," Ivàn Ivànovitch and "Ned Bratts" read backwards with singular dramatic effect; but with this distinction, that in the latter the event is foreshadowed by natural circumstance; in the former by an artistic device. The picturesque and rapid action of the Russian Idyll is symbolised by an axe, the description of which stands as a literary frontispiece to it. This axe, which is spoken of as in use among Russian workmen at the present day, is a peculiar instrument, combining with its own special properties those of many other carpenter's tools, and loses something of dramatic suitability by the practised skill implied in such a construction. But the versatility thus suggested is part of its dramatic use. It can do all kinds of carpenter's work. It can on occasion do more. Ivan Ivanovitch is wielding such an axe. His mighty strokes are shaping a tree-trunk into a mast. He stands before us with the blue eyes and "honey-coloured" beard of the northern giant he is intended to be. The time is that of Peter the Great. The place, a Russian village, for which space has been barely rescued from the forest solitudes extending on either side of the road from Petersburg to Moscow. The ice and snow of a Russian winter are on the ground. Suddenly there is a "burst of bells;" a trampling of hoofs; and a sledge bearing what looks like the dead body of a neighbour's wife dashes up to the spot; the horse stumbling and falling in the act. The neighbours gather around. The woman has only fainted; a long-drawn scream announces her return to consciousness; by degrees her tale is told. They were about to return together-she, her husband and her three children, from the distant village to which he was summoned perhaps a month ago to help in building a church. But fire broke out; all hands were needed to suppress it; and Dmitri must needs despatch his wife and little ones homeward in all haste and alone. The infant in her arms, the two elder boys warmly packed at her feet; old Droog to carry, and a rising moon to light them on the well-known way-what harm could come to them? The good horse gallops bravely; for the moment he is young again. But presently there is a sound-a soughing. Droog's ears fly back to listen. It is the wind-he knows it, and plunges on again. But there is no wind; the breath goes straight up from their lips; and there is still the sound! Low, less low, louder, not to be mistaken; the tread of wolves' feet in the snow. And now they are in sight. They press onwards, line upon line, a wedge-like mass widening in the advance; through the unnatural daylight born of the moon and snow; through the cruel pines which bend no branch to hinder or conceal; distant still, but still gaining on their prey. And now one has reached the sledge. Her life shall be yielded

before her children's.

They are safe if they will only lie still. But Stepan will not be still. He was always the naughty one; sullen and puny; the worst of her little brood. She has loved him with heart and soul. But how save him in spite of himself? He will not be advised. He is mad with fear. And now his brother is shrieking. She tugs, she struggles. If she must lose one, it is the strong, not the weak whom the Tsar requires. Perhaps her hands relax. Perhaps they get entangled. Stepàn is gone. But she escapes with two. She is still a rich mother. Some have no boy. Some have, and lose him.

God knows which

Is worse: how pitiful to see your weakling pine
And pale and pass away!

She is all but content. But hark-the tramp again-not the band, -no-the numbers are less-the race is slack. Some alas! are feasting, some are "full-fed." But there are enough to seize the fresh prey. Their eyes are like points of brass as they gleam in their level line. One, the same, is at their head again. She dashes her fist into his face; he may crunch that if he will. Terentii is gathered into her lap; her very heartstrings tie him round. The bag of relics hangs safe about his neck. 'Twas through my arms, crossed arms, he―nuzzling now with snout, Now ripping, tooth and claw-plucked, pulled Terentii out, A prize indeed! I saw how could I else but see?— My precious one-I bit to hold back-pulled from me!

He will wreak ven

But the babe is safe! He will grow into a man. geance upon the whole brood. She outwits them yet. Day dawns on the farthest snow. Its rosy light is upon it. Home is all but reached. Yet again-no-thank Heaven-not the band; but-yes; one is in pursuit! She sees him in the distance

one speck, one spot, one ball

growing bigger at every bound. It is the same again. She plucks him by the tongue; she will tear at it till she wrenches it out. It has but given him a fresh taste of flesh. She falls on the infant's body. She covers it with her whole self. The teeth furrow her shoulder. They grate to the very bone. What more could a mother do? The babe is scooped from under her very heart. At that moment sense forsakes her.

This, then, is the upshot of the story. She has surrendered her children to be devoured, and lives to tell it; yet she scarcely perceives the extent of her revelation. Recalling, rather than relating, the horrors of the night, she is perhaps herself blinded by the sophistries which have covered her escape; and with the retrospect comes also a reaction. Sheltered, revived, with kindly faces beaming upon her, regret itself is melting away in the sweet consciousness of her security. She weeps, relieving, almost happy tears. It is to Ivan Ivànovitch that her narrative has been especially addressed. His knee has propped her head.