In all mythology there was something foreign to the tenacious humanity of his intellect; he was most open to its appeal where it presented divinity stretching forth a helping hand to man.

The noble "idyl" of _Echetlos_ is thus a counterpart, in its brief way, to the great tragic tale of Herakles and Alkestis.

Echetlos, the mysterious ploughman who shone amid the ranks at Marathon, "clearing Greek earth of weed As he routed through the Sabian and rooted up the Mede," is one of the many figures which thrill us with Browning's passion for Greece, and he is touched with a kind of magic which it did not lie in his nature often to communicate.

But the great successes of the _Dramatic Idyls_ are to be found mainly among the tales of the purely human kind that Browning had been used to tell.

_Pheidippides_ belongs to the heroic line of _How they brought the Good News_ and _Herve Riel_.
The poetry of crisis, of the sudden, unforeseen, and irremediable critical moment, upon which so much of Browning's psychology converges, is carried to an unparalleled point of intensity in _Clive_ and _Martin Relph_.