His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains sordid still.

Not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the transmuting work of imagination has been already done.

It is no accident that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an effective source of poetry.

The poems of this decade form thus an odd motley series--realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent, Aeschylus and Euripides, the divine helper Herakles and the glorious embodiment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and re-emerging after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of Miranda or the Elder Man.
No inept legend for the Browning of this decade is the noble song of Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly declaimed.

"Earth's poet" and "the heavenly Muse" are not allies, and they at times go different ways.
_Herve Riel_ (published March 1871) is less characteristic of Browning in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was inspired.