They increase as they hunt: for I see, through the pine-trunks ranged each side,
Slip forth new fiend and fiend, make wider and still more wide
The four-footed steady advance. The foremost—none may pass:
They are elders and lead the line, eye and eye—green-glowing brass!
But a long way distant still. Droug, save us! He does his best:
Yet they gain on us, gain, till they reach,—one reaches....
How utter the rest?"
The setting of the story, the vast motionless Russian landscape, the village life, the men and women, has a singular expressiveness; and the revelation of the woman's character, the exposure of her culpable weakness, seen in the very excuses by which she endeavours to justify herself, is brought about with singularly masterly art. There are moments of essential drama, not least significantly in the last lines, above all in those two pregnant words: "How otherwise? asked he."
Ned Bratts takes almost the same position among Browning's humorous poems that Ivàn Ivànovitch does among his narratives. It is a whole comedy in itself. Surroundings and atmosphere are called up with perfect art and the subtlest sympathy. What opening could be a better preparation for the heated and grotesque utterances of Ned Bratts than the wonderful description of the hot day? It serves to put us into precisely the right mood for seeing and feeling the comic tragedy that follows. Dickens himself never painted a more riotously realistic scene, nor delineated a better ruffian than the murderous rascal precariously converted by Bunyan and his book.
In the midst of these realistic tragedies and comedies, Pheidippides, with its clear Greek outline and charm and heroical grace, stands finely contrasted. The measure is of Browning's invention, and is finely appropriate to the character of the poem.