"The Broken Heart" is the most healthy of his plays. Orgilus, whose life has been blighted because Penthea has married Bassanio through the intervention of her brother, the great General Ithocles, pursues his revenge upon Ithocles in spite of much delay and apparent reconciliation. Finally he stabs Ithocles to death just as Ithocles is to be married to the princess Calantha, and just as Penthea dies of madness and starvation. The familiar round of revenge, madness, and torture here reappears, but it is told in a story full of romantic sentiment and human passion, and not without sunshine as well as shadow. It is the final scenes, however, which every reader remembers. Calantha is dancing when the tidings of the deaths of her father and her lover are brought to her, and she dances on, hiding her grief and playing her part nobly, until, duty accomplished, her heart is free to yield to its bursting sorrow. It is in scenes like these, showing passion restrained or overborne for the moment, or the strain and suspense preceding the crash, that Ford is at his best. The marvelous parting scene between brother and sister in "'Tis Pity" is perfection itself. His imagination dissolves the horrible story into the very language of the breaking heart. His verse, lacking both the old rhetorical artificiality and the vivacity and adaptability of Fletcher's, possesses a restraint and moderation of language and a complex and beautiful melody all its own. At times it is the thinnest of translucent veils "through which passion is burning as the radiant lines of morning." One may find in him somewhat of the perverse inquisitiveness of Donne. A wayward and solitary searcher in the realms of poetry, he voyaged only to regions unexplored or forbidding. But, as we have seen, his imagination, wayward though it was, took direction from his contemporaries, and he was representative of much in current tragedy. Though Ford's ethical attitude is perhaps more non-committal than that of any of his contemporaries, yet his casuistical interest in moral problems, and the emphasis which he places on such problems at the expense of his stories, are traits common in the drama of the time, and especially in the collaborative work of Middleton and Rowley. His absorption with questions of sex, his searching for new sensation, his attempt to bestow on moral perversion the enticements of poetry correspond with what is most decadent in Fletcher and Shirley. Like his fine-spoken and well-mannered courtiers and impulsive ladies, Ford imagined in an atmosphere of unhealthy emotion. His plays are immoral because their passion is so often morbid and their sentiment mawkish. His power to reveal character and passion, which rank him with the greatest of the Elizabethans, was discovered in his searching the by-paths of the abnormal and pathological. Pathos for him was a flower plucked from a poisonous exotic.