A passage follows of delicate and simple poetry, written by Browning in a manner in which I would he had oftener written.

To read it is to regret that, being able to do this, he chose rather to write, from time to time, as if he were hewing his way through tangled underwood.

No lovelier image of Proserpina has been made in poetry, not even in Tennyson's _Demeter_, than this-- And even while it lay, i' the look of him, Dead, the dimmed body, bright Alkestis' soul Had penetrated through the populace Of ghosts, was got to Kore,--throned and crowned The pensive queen o' the twilight, where she dwells Forever in a muse, but half away From flowery earth she lost and hankers for,-- And there demanded to become a ghost Before the time.
Whereat the softened eyes Of the lost maidenhood that lingered still Straying among the flowers in Sicily, Sudden was startled back to Hades' throne By that demand: broke through humanity Into the orbed omniscience of a God, Searched at a glance Alkestis to the soul And said ...
"Hence, thou deceiver! This is not to die, If, by the very death which mocks me now, The life, that's left behind and past my power, Is formidably doubled ..." And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit, The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look; And lo, Alkestis was alive again, And of Admetos' rapture who shall speak?
The old conception has more reality.

This is in the vague world of modern psychical imagination.

Nevertheless it has its own beauty, and it enlarges Browning's picture of the character of Balaustion.
Her character is still further enlarged in _Aristophanes' Apology_.