All her powers have now ripened, and the last touch has been given to them by her ideal sorrow for Athens, the country of her soul, where high intelligence and imagination had created worlds. She leaves it now, ruined and degraded, and the passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of Balaustion into spiritual splendour. Athens, "hearted in her heart," has perished ignobly. Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies--in the embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean. This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery and disgrace, "Oh," she cries, "bear me away--wind, wave and bark!" But Browning does not leave Balaustion with only this deep emotion in her heart. He gives her the spiritual passion of genius. She is swept beyond her sorrow into that invisible world where the soul lives with the gods, with the pure Ideas of justice, truth and love; where immortal life awaits the disembodied soul and we shall see Euripides. In these high thoughts she will outlive her sorrow. Why should despair be? Since, distinct above Man's wickedness and folly, flies the wind And floats the cloud, free transport for our soul Out of its fleshly durance dim and low,-- Since disembodied soul anticipates (Thought-borne as now, in rapturous unrestraint) Above all crowding, crystal silentness, Above all noise, a silver solitude:-- Surely, where thought so bears soul, soul in time May permanently bide, "assert the wise," There live in peace, there work in hope once more-- O nothing doubt, Philemon! Greed and strife, Hatred and cark and care, what place have they In yon blue liberality of heaven? How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes! Heaven, earth and sea, my warrant--in their name, Believe--o'er falsehood, truth is surely sphered, O'er ugliness beams beauty, o'er this world Extends that realm where, "as the wise assert," Philemon, thou shalt see Euripides Clearer than mortal sense perceived the man!