He strode to Gauthier, in his throat Gave him the lie, then struck his mouth With one back-handed blow that wrote In blood men's verdict there. North, South, East, West, I looked. The lie was dead, And damned, and truth stood up instead."[19]
Of the two aspects of _Queen Worship_, one, _Rudel to the Lady of Tripoli_, has a mournfully sweet pathos in its lingering lines, and _Cristina_, not without a touch of vivid passion, contains that personal conviction afterwards enshrined in the lovelier casket of _Evelyn Hope_. _Artemis Prologuizes_ is Browning's only experiment in the classic style. The fragment was meant to form part of a longer work, which was to take up the legend of Hippolytus at the point where Euripides dropped it. The project was no doubt abandoned for the same wise reasons which led Keats to leave unfinished a lovelier experiment in _Hyperion_. It was in this poem that Browning first adopted the Greek spelling of proper names, a practice which he has since carried out, with greater consistency, in his transcripts from Æschylus and Euripides.
Perhaps the finest of the _Dramatic Lyrics_ is the little lyric tragedy, _In a Gondola_, a poem which could hardly be surpassed in its perfect union or fusion of dramatic intensity with charm and variety of music. It was suggested by a picture of Maclise, and tells of two Venetian lovers, watched by a certain jealous "Three"; of their brief hour of happiness, and of the sudden vengeance of the Three. There is a brooding sense of peril over all the blithe and flitting fancies said or sung to one another by the lovers in their gondola; a sense, however, of future rather than of present peril, something of a zest and a piquant pleasure to them. The sudden tragic ending, anticipated yet unexpected, rounds the whole with a dramatic touch of infallible instinct. I know nothing with which the poem may be compared: its method and its magic are alike its own. We might hear it or fancy it perhaps in one of the Ballades of Chopin, with its entrancing harmonies, its varied and delicate ornamentation, its under-tone of passion and sadness, its storms and gusts of wind-like lashing notes, and the piercing shiver that thrills through its suave sunshine.