And he has little difficulty in making the oracular brevity of Aeschylus look bald, and his sublime incoherences frigid.[61] The result is, nevertheless, very interesting and instructive to the student of Browning's mind.

Nowhere else do we feel so acutely how foreign to his versatile and athletic intellect was the primitive and elemental imagination which interprets the heart and the conscience of nations.

His acute individualism in effect betrayed him, and made his too faithful translation resemble a parody of this mighty fragment of the mind of Themistoclean Athens by one of the brilliant irresponsible Sophists of the next generation.
[Footnote 61: It is hard to explain how Browning came also to choose his restless hendecasyllables as a medium for the stately iambic of AEschylus.

It is more like Fletcher outdoing himself in double endings.] The spring and summer of 1877 were not productive.

The summer holiday was spent in a new haunt among the Savoy Alps, and Browning missed the familiar stimulus of the sea-air.