Halbert and Hob, Martin Relph_; and he takes from Virgil's hesitating lips the hint of a joyous pagan adventure of the gods, and tells it with his own brilliant plenitude and volubility. The mythic treatment of nature had never appealed much to Browning, even as a gay decorative device; he was presently to signalise his rejection of it in _Gerard de Lairesse_, a superb example of what he rejected. 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 _Hervé 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_. And in most of these "idyls" there emerges a trait always implicit in Browning but only distinctly apparent in this last decade--the ironical contrasts between the hidden deeps of a man's soul and the assumptions or speculations of his neighbours about it. The two worlds--inner and outer--fall more sharply apart; stranger abysses of self-consciousness appear on the one side, more shallow and complacent illusions on the other. Relph's horror of remorse--painted with a few strokes of incomparable intensity, like his 'Get you behind the man I am now, you man that I used to be!'--is beyond the comprehension of the friendly peasants; Clive's "fear" is as much misunderstood by his auditor as his courage by the soldiers; the "foolishness" of Muleykeh equally illudes his Arab comrades; the Russian villagers, the Pope, and the lord have to fumble through a long process of argument to the conclusion which for Iván had been the merest matter of fact from the first. Admirable in its quiet irony is the contrast between the stormy debate over his guilt or innocence and his serene security of mind as he sits cutting out a toy for his children:-- "They told him he was free As air to walk abroad; 'How otherwise?' asked he."