in truce, incited by Medea, assail the Argonauts, who are driven back, fighting, towards their ship. In the tent is now consulted what further shall be done. To her father's angry reproaches of her faithless preservation of his enemy, Medea replies by entreaty, earnest and inspiriting, that he will muster his strength, and before the coming dawn, have cast out the strangers from his land. To her further urgently expressed desire, he grants that she shall proceed, under her brother's escort, to some concealed place of safety in the heart of the country: "Thither," says he, "where is the Fleece kept;" to which she vehemently but fruitlessly objects. There are two roads. One, passing near the encampment of the Greeks; the other, rough, difficult, and less trodden, by a bridge over the river. The last is. made choice of. As she is departing, her father again slighting her repugnance and horror for every thing which threatens to connect her with the blood stained sorrow-teeming Fleece, forces into her hand the key of the hidden entrance, or falling-door as the Germans have the advantage of calling it, to its subterranean strong-hold: and she takes her leave. We extract, chiefly for the view which they present of her feelings and character, one or two speeches of hers out of this scene, although perhaps chargeable with the same fault, in a still higher degree, on which we have already remarked. The passage will explain for itself the connexion in which it occurs. Aietes. Good, then! I arm my friends. Thou goest with us. Aietes. Strange one, thou. Not only from the bow To whirl the ponderous spear, and swing on high And drive the foe. Med. Never. Aietes. No? Med. Send me back Come on with us: To the land's heart, my father, deep, where only Aietes. Thou wilt not with us! and shall I believe thee? Med. Why ask me, if thou know'st it? Must thou hear Hid from myself?—I hid ?—the Gods hid from me. Let not my troubled transport, the warm flush That clothes, I feel, my cheeks, mislead thee. Thou Not amid darkness can I guess and fear: That knits, or can unknit, those magic bands. Seen it hath none: what pleases thee, must please; i When I beheld him,-first beheld him,- Of love-Oh, too fair name for cursed thing! But wish not that I meet him! let me fly him! I am not she I am.-Drive out, hunt, kill him. As may easily be supposed, the river during the night, in flood, has "disdained its bridge," and the first intelligence which meets Absyrtus on setting out, is that the only road open to him is that which endangers his sister's falling into the hands from which she flies. Accordingly, the escort has not proceeded far when it finds itself engaged with the lately retreating Argonauts, who have taken up, on the way to their camp, a position favourable, as they think, for cutting off the King's communication with his interior. The eight or ten Greeks-if, as we incline to think, the reinforcement sent for cannot yet have come up,-drive out the forty or fifty Colchians, leaving Jason to urge his suit alone with Medea. He woos her characteristically, with passion that will not be withstood, and successfully, if it could appear to him success to shake her spirit from height to depth, with uncontrollable, unconcealable emotion. But he finds her inexcusably self-willed and perverse; and he conceives that he does nothing unless he wring from her what is not easy, and it seems, in truth, too early to exact, an avowal, in words, of her love. At the moment when he is compelled to confess himself in this point frustrated-(we regret not to insert the scene, or monologue, as it might almost be called-it is long, eloquent, and original,)-Aietes, who has in the meantime succoured his son, follows the now in turn again retiring Argonauts; and Jason, utterly impatient of his discomfiture, without difficulty or hesitation, on the first word said, makes over to him his daughter Medea. It might seem that the advantage of the accident which had effected their meeting to the movement of the drama was, with the assistance of Medea to the Argonautic enterprise, for the present, at least, here lost. On the contrary, she no sooner feels herself again under the protection of her father, than her inflexibility, unmoved whilst she seemed to be in her lover's power, falters; and when he, eager to prosecute his perilous achievement unaided, bids her a passionate and final farewell, she is conquered, and breathes his name. Quite satisfied, he herewith claims her as his wife; with one hand taking her by the arm, whilst with the other he throws off her father's hold, and leads her back amongst his own party. More fighting does not, for the present, ensue. Aietes challenges his daughter to elect between passion and duty; and, when she has answered him by her silence, pouring out on her his parental maledictions, he gives her over to the selfchosen miseries which he foresees awaiting her, turns from her, and departs. Jason now desires her to lead him to the Fleece, which she refuses He will go alone. With importunate and pathetic entreaty, as prescient of the Chorus. Hear! hear our prayer! That love us, well to love, to hate that hate! Make us rich! make us strong!-Great Queen!-Darimba ! Chorus. Hear us! Darimba!-Hear! Darimba! And with the alarums of our loud-voiced chase Let the green forest clamour near and far! The sun doth mount!-Out! out !—And she amongst us, -Thou here, Peritta? &c. Medea, aware that the damsel, so named, (who had lately, by giving way to the weakness of love, and against a positive formal promise not to desert her mistress, intending, at least, to marry, incurred her displeasure, and been, in consequence, forbidden her presence,) has transgressed the prohibition, bitterly upbraids her falsehood, and dismisses her with great scorn to the lowly duties she has chosen in the poor and "smoky" cabin of her lover. The incident is given to display her character, and present haughty freedom from feelings which will fatally overrule her will and life. A Colchian, now entering, announces, that a ship, manned with strangers, has touched their coast. The Princess refers him to her father, Aietes, who, upon hearing the tidings, comes out immediately after from his palace. Not one of all the characters is more forcibly and entirely conceived, or more successfully drawn, than this old barbarian king. Without law-inflamed instantaneously with the prospect of plunder-artful, false, courageous in his person, whilst suspicious of men, mistrustful even of events, he is timid in his expectations and pur poses, strongly loving his children, yet wayward and harsh in his humour and conduct towards them-as a king, challenging compliance with his will, yet dishonouring his state, and not seeming to know that he does so, by the frank avowal of unkingly fearseager in his hate of a stranger, to whom he feels no tie-superstitious, but, under the impulse of his passion, impious. He discloses, although in doubt, to his daughter, his quicklytaken resolution to possess himself of the "gold, treasures, wealthy spoil," which the vessel bears; then desires from her counsel and aid, versed as she is in her mother's arts to draw from herbs and stones potions that bind the will and fetter the strength, able to summon spirits, and conjure the moon. Whilst he is in anger at her wilful slowness in her part, a second Colchian brings him the request of the strangers for an audience, which may result in a friendly covenant. The result he foresees, and now distinctly requires of his daughter a drink known to him as within her skill, infusing irresistible sleep, which she, having first asked " for what use," and received no answer, but the command repeated, goes out to prepare. The strangers prove to be Phryxus, the well-known importer of the Fleece into Colchis-here, indeed, accomplishing the adventure, with aid but of the wings of a ship, not, as in the pure fable, on the back of a flying ram, and the companions of his voyage, driven by storm of the past night upon the Colchian coast. Of the noblest Grecian blood, (thus he relates of himself to Aietes,) Jove-descended, but a fugitive from his father's house, and from envy and hate of the second marriage-bed, seeking his fortune among strangers, he came, his father's spies dodging his flight, to Del phos. In the Temple, in which he stood in the light of the evening sun, weary with the burden of his way, and with gazing on the rich wonders of the place, statues and offerings-he had sunk down in sleep. In his dreams appeared the figure of a man, surrounded with light, in naked strength, bearing in his right hand a club, with bushy beard and hair, and on his shoulders a golden ram's fleece, the very "PERONTO," in a word, whom we saw lately, and whom, for the scene does not change, we still see, guarding from his altar the Colchian shores. This illustrious personage graciously inclined himself towards the sleeper, and smiling, bade him "take with him Victory and Revenge," and, unfastening the Fleece from his shoulders, tendered it to him. Awaking at this instant, he perceived standing before him, amidst the glitter of morning sunshine, the same Form in marble, mantled with even such a Golden Fleece, and, on examination, the name "Colchis," graven on the pedestal, an ancient offering, though, it appears afterwards, not directly from the country, of the Statue of this Deity. Boldly construing the vision, or what was but the wonted fairy-work of fancy and the senses blending their play into a human dream-too small wellhead of the stream of ineffable calamity-and acting his interpretationhe took off the Fleece from the shoulders of the God, and, lifting it as a banner on his spear, hastened through the temple gates, through the midst of his father's pursuers awaiting him without, the priests and the people all suddenly awe-struck, and yielding him open way to the sea. It seems his vessel and comrades lay expecting him there, for he embarked, he tells us, forthwith, 66 a and, with the Fleece flying high, golden streamer" from his mast-head, stemmed the raging flood under wrathful skies, to Colchis. This story, cast in good classical form, graced with something of a voluble and picturesque Greek eloquence, and very apt to the impressible and unwary speaker, is liable to this censure, that it supposes no deeper origin than the chance-illusion of sleep, to an Act, namely, this earliest Abreption of this famous Fleece, that carried conse quences which to Greek thought involved heavenly leading and peculiar dispensations of wrath, first, an expedition of heroes and demigods for its recovery, and, finally, the overthrow of princely houses. The story little avails the young adventurer who relates it; for it moves in the breast of his royal auditor no singular favour to himself, who is self-convicted, unless a God gave his dream, of double sacrilegeno belief, anxiously solicited, in the protection of Peronto-no misgiving of the murderous purposes, touching himself and his companions, which had found their way into the heart of Aietes, with the intelligence of their arrival. The strangers are all killed, off the stage, at the King's table; and their leader, Phryxus, who, on noticing as his friends dropped one by one into strange sleep, the ominous looks, whispers, and gestures of the attendants, has quitted the house in alarm, is slain by the King's own hand, at the foot of his God's Altar. The Barbarian has flattered himself, that from this slaughter and spoliation of unoffending strangers, he has removed all criminality and all violation of hospitable right, when, by having neither offered nor refused Phryxus his house's shelter and welcome, he had entangled his victim into inviting himself. But the unfortunate Greek, in the instant of his fate, re-annexes, if one may so speak, to the act this much inseparable guilt, by placing in the hands, and therewith in the custody, of the for one moment incautious Aietes, his property, the Fleece; thus constituting him, it appears, his Host. The poet's private faith as to the efficacy of one or the other remarkable manoeuvre, is not, indeed, as he does not speak in his own person, easily put past doubt. Yet, that he does not judge the last to have been wholly unsuccessful, and if so, then neither wholly unrequired, we might seem left to guess, from the ingenious, if we should not almost say excessive pains which he ever afterwards takes to attach the mischiefs successively arising, and every turn almost of his drama's varying fable, to what the reader, no doubt, will own to be now enough weighted with blood and retribution— the Golden Fleece. SECOND PLAY OF THE TRILOGY. The Second Part renews the history, after an interval, apparently, of years. Medea, stricken, if this can be said, with remorse of her father's crime, (in which, however in a degree minister ing to it, the poet does not consider her as participating,) bowed with agony of the deed-still more, perhaps, with the terrific foresight which haunts her of its consequences-the vision glaring in the prophetess's soul, and refusing to be dispelled, of wrath disturbed out of darkness, inexorable, inexpia ble-has fled from human commerce, and shut up in an old desolate tower amongst woods, there mixing past and future in her ceaseless miserable dream, she broods over woe. Hither, by night, Aietes, with his son Absyrtus, now first introduced, comes, seek ing her counsel and succour; for the Revengers, the ARGONAUTS, claiming the spoils of the murdered Phryxus, and above all, the splendid and fatal Fleece, are on his land. Absyrtus, whose innocence of extreme youth, joined with the aspirations of dawning heroism, and with much manly tenderness of filial and brotherly affection, is very happily thought and depicted, leads, with the sprightly pride of a boy, making their way through the thicket with his newly given sword. The old King follows, full of irritation and apprehensions, incensed by the approach of his enemies, trembling at once with belief of their power, and with reflections that rise and are not to be kept down on the cause of their coming, and seeing listeners or spectres, in stones and trees. After some words which explain the posture of affairs, Medea's altered temper, and her manner of life made available by her, it appears, for the prosecution of her magical studies, Absyrtus, at the King's bidding, summons her to descend. She hesitates, till compelled by her father's will and voice, which, either from an habitual irresistible ascendancy, parental and kingly, held by him over her-or from the sense of duty, she does not disobey. She bears a torch, which the king, whom light offends, desires her to extinguish. He then asks, by what leave, forsaking the protection of the paternal roof, and holding fellowship but with the desert and her own wild mood, she has refused compliance with a message from him, calling her to him. Her answer is in a strain, meant, doubtless, as more deeply tinged with imagination, to be the expression of a mind acting upon itself in long solitude, with vehement and extraordinary thought. It well expresses, though perhaps too apparently in the forms of a later and different age of thought, one distinguishing constitu ent in our author's invention of his heroine's character-boldly assigned and well applied, for the most part, to support the interest of his poem-and not often much taken out of its dramatic propriety-the Moral Sensibility with which he has endowed her and to which, if the reader will add passion measureless in depth and force self-reliance indestructible-and an understanding in comprehensiveness, insight, and clearness, of the highest order he will possess the outline of Grillparzer's Medea. Need we observe to him, that the impressions which she appears here as suffering, the consternation, from retrospect and prospect, fallen upon her spirit, evidenced indubitably in the manner we have described, and seeking utterance in her words, all tell in tragic effect, far be yond the moment of the drama in which they are made present to sight and hearing, that the gloom thus loaded upon its opening scenes, passes not along with these from the spectator's heart. Medea (speaks.) Hear if thou canst, and if thou dar'st, be wroth !O that I might be silent, ever silent! Thine house is hateful to me-I am fill'd |