For in the self-same cedar, me with thee, Will I provide that these our friends shall place, From thee, my faithful one of all the world! Alkestis. O, children! now yourselves have heard these things— Admetos. Another woman to be over you, Nor yet dishonor me! And now at least I say it, and I will accomplish too! Adm. Alk. Dear gift from the dear hand! Thus I take Do thou become Alk. Adm. Child-child! Just when I needed most to live, below Ah me! And what shall I do then left lonely thus? Alk. And truly the dimmed eye draws earthward now ! The most pathetic of the tragedians, Aristotle considers Euripides to be. Here, exercising good art, the poet prolongs the pathos of the scene of death with additional exclamations from Admetus, from the children, and from the chorus of bystanders. Admetus bids his Thessalian subjects share his grief with him. They must clip their own locks, and shear their horses' manes. Twelve months they must refrain from cheerful music. The chorus hereupon chant, moving in mystic dance the while, as follows (for this lyric strain we use Mr. Potter's rhymed version): STROPHE I. Immortal bliss be thine, Daughter of Pelias, in the realms below; Immortal pleasures round thee flow, Though never there the sun's bright beams shall shine. And the Stygian boatman old, Whose rude hands grasp the oar, the rudder guide, The dead conveying o'er the tide, Let him be told, so rich a freight before His light skiff never bore: Tell him, that o'er the joyless lakes ANTISTROPHE I. Thy praise the bards shall tell, When to their hymning voice the echo rings; Circling when the vernal hours Bring the Carnean feast; while through the night Shows her magnific state; Their voice thy glorious death shall raise, STROPHE II. O, that I had the power, Could I but bring thee from the shades of night Again to view this golden light, To leave that boat, to leave that dreary shore, For thou, O best of women, thou alone For thy lord's life daredst give thy own. But should he choose to wed again, Mine and thy children's hearts would hold him in disdain. ANTISTROPHE II. When, to avert his doom, His mother in the earth refused to lie; To save his son from an untimely tomb; Though the hand of time had spread In youth's fresh bloom, in beauty's radiant glow, Though rare the lot: then should I prove The indissoluble bond of faithfulness and love. In the foregoing version of this Euripidean chorus, our readers have the opportunity of studying the symmetry, or correspondence in measure, between line and line, in strophe and antistrophe of the elaborate Greek choral ode. The sorrowful monotony of the play now suffers a sudden, almost staggering, interruption. Heracles (Hercules) bursts in with a gruff and bluff heartiness of unconscious discord, which Mr. Browning well reproduces. He conceives this demigod as a great, wholesome-hearted, generous champion of mankind, feeding enormously, but not gluttonously, simply to repair the waste of his prodigious exertions on behalf of the suffering. He thus, through his Greek girl Balaustion. puts a fine poetic gloss upon what otherwise would seem gross conduct on Heracles's part, We must shorten the story of how Admetus concealed from Heracles the true situation of affairs and got him to stay as guest, under the impression that only a stranger woman of the house had died. Admetus did not quite lie outright to his guest-friend. Who is the man that has died? inquires Heracles. Not a man-a woman, evades Admetus. Alien, then, or born kin of thine? pursues Heracles. Alien, parries Admetus, though still related to my house. Bystanders and domestics are surprised to see Admetus insist at such cost on being hospitable to the stranger. However, the complaisant chorus laud the hospitality of the house in a strain which, fortunately, we are able to show our readers under a noble form given to it by one who signs only the initials "T. E. W." to this choice fragment of translation, published first as a contribution to the "College Magazine," Dublin, October, 1857: Hail, house of the open door, To the guest and the wanderer free! Deigned to inhabit thee. In thy halls disguised in his shepherd's weeds To the feeding flocks Piping his pastoral lay. And the spotted lynx was tame With the joy of the mighty spell; And a tawny troop, the lions came And where the tall pines waved their locks, Light tripped the fawn O'er the level lawn Entranced by the genial lay. The house where the lord Admetus bides Is blest for the Pythian's sake Fast by the shores that skirt the tides Of the pleasant Boebian lake; His fallows and fields the Molossians bound Of Ægean steep All Pelion owns his sway. He will welcome his guest with a moistened lid, And affection's tear will start unbid For her that hath lately died. For the noble heart to its sorrows yields; He will act aright By the dead and the stranger guest. Admetus invites the sympathizing chorus to salute his dead wife as she is borne to the tomb. But Euripides provides for us a fresh surprise. It is a scene between Admetus and his father Pheres. A most unseemly altercation takes place between father and son over the very bier of the dead. Mere selfishness has seldom appeared more unrelievedly repulsive than in this scene it appears as exemplified in Admetus. The whole representation seems to us to waver on a razoredge between the serious and comic. We condense a specimen. Pheres enters with a train of servants bringing funeral gifts for the deceased Alcestis. He speaks: Pheres. Take this tribute of adornment, deep In the earth let it descend along with her! I maintain, if mortals must Marry, this sort of marriage is the sole Permitted those among them who are wise! Admetos. Neither to this interment called by me |