She leaves it now, ruined and degraded, and the passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of Balaustion into spiritual splendour.

Athens, "hearted in her heart," has perished ignobly.

Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies--in the embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean.
This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery and disgrace, "Oh," she cries, "bear me away--wind, wave and bark!" But Browning does not leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her heart.

He gives her the spiritual passion of genius.

She is swept beyond her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the gods, with the pure Ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see Euripides.