"I should hardly look for an impossible transmission of the reputed magniloquence and sonority of the Greek; and this with the less regret, inasmuch as there is abundant musicality elsewhere, but nowhere else than in his poem the ideas of the poet."
He quotes Matthew Arnold on the Greeks: "their expression is so excellent, because it is so simple and so well subordinated, because it draws its force directly from the pregnancy of the matter which it conveys ... not a word wasted, not a sentiment capriciously thrown in, stroke on stroke."
He is reasonable about the Greek spelling. He points out that γόνον ἰδὼν κάλλιστον ἀνδρῶν sounds very poorly as "Seeing her son the fairest of men" but is outshouted in "Remirando il figliuolo bellissimo degli uomini," and protests his fidelity to the meaning of Aeschylus.
His weakness in this work is where it essentially lay in all of his expression, it rests in the term "ideas"—"Thought" as Browning understood it—"ideas" as the term is current, are poor two dimensional stuff, a scant, scratch covering. "Damn ideas, anyhow." An idea is only an imperfect induction from fact.
The solid, the "last atom of force verging off into the first atom of matter" is the force, the emotion, the objective sight of the poet. In the Agamemnon it is the whole rush of the action, the whole wildness of Kassandra's continual shrieking, the flash of the beacon fires burning unstinted wood, the outburst of
Τροιάν Αχαιῶν οὖσαν,
or the later
Τροίαν Ἀχαιοὶ τήδ' ἔχουσ' ἐν ἡπέρα.
"Troy is the greeks'." Even Rossetti has it better than Browning: "Troy's down, tall Troy's on fire," anything, literally anything that can be shouted, that can be shouted uncontrolledly and hysterically. "Troy is the Greeks'" is an ambiguity for the ear. "Know that our men are in Ilion."
Anything but a stilted unsayable jargon. Yet with Browning we have