This is _Herve Riel_, a ballad of fire and joy and triumph.

It is curiously French in sentiment and expression, and the eager sea-delight in it is plainly French, not English in feeling.

Nor is it only French; it is Breton in audacity, in self-forgetfulness, in carelessness of reward, and in loyalty to country, to love and to home.

If Browning had been all English, this transference of himself into the soul of another nationality would have been wonderful, nay, impossible.

As it is, it is wonderful enough; and this self-transference--one of his finest poetic powers--is nowhere better accomplished than in this poem, full of the salt wind and the leap and joy of the sea-waves; but even more full, as was natural to Browning, of the Breton soul of Herve Riel.
In _Balaustion's Adventure_ (1871) which next appeared, the imaginative elements, as we have seen, are still alive and happy; and though they only emerge at intervals in its continuation, _Aristophanes' Apology_ (1875), yet they do emerge.