The versing of _Echetlos_, its rugged, rousing sound, its movement, are in most excellent harmony with the image of the rude, giant "Holder of the ploughshare," who at Marathon drove his furrows through the Persians and rooted up the Mede.

Browning has gathered into one picture and one sound the whole spirit of the story.

_Pan and Luna_ is a bold re-rendering of the myth that Vergil enshrines, and the greater part of it is of such poetic freshness that I think it must be a waif from the earlier years of his poetry.

Nor is there better imaginative work in his descriptive poetry than the image of the naked moon, in virginal distress, flying for refuge through the gazing heaven to the succourable cloud--fleece on fleece of piled-up snow, drowsily patient--where Pan lay in ambush for her beauty.
Among these more gracious idyls, one of singular rough power tells the ghastly tale of the mother who gave up her little children to the wolves to save herself.

Browning liked this poem, and the end he added to the story--how the carpenter, Ivan, when the poor frightened woman confessed, lifted his axe and cut off her head; how he knew that he did right, and was held to have done right by the village and its pope.