present the poet's vision faithfully; but how vivid they are to the mind's eye! Instances in Dante are numerous, but I will select two. Caron dimonio, con occhi di bragia, Charon," demoniac form," with wheels of flame around his eyes, collecting the shades into his boat upon the livid lake, and striking with his oar whoever lingers: another unpicturable picture. This is in the third Canto: in the ninth we have the three Furies rising up at the fiery top of a tower in the city of Dis, blood-stained, girt about the waist with hydras t of the deepest green, having small serpents for loose ringlets, and the large horned cerastes wound about their temples by way of braid: Megæra on the left, Alecto weeping on the =right, Tisiphone in the midst. This is picturable: Flaxman has designed it finely: his Megæra expresses deadly hate; Alecto the torture of intolerable grief: (Dante describes her as weeping:) Tisiphone, the central figure, appears the image of Frenzy, to which all violent passion tends, and in which it is merged when it transcends certain limits. Euripides has many pictures: there is the Trojan dame, gazing into the golden mirror, that flashes back the light with interminable reflection, while she binds up her locks under the head-band or mitre, ready to sink upon the vest-spread couch, where her husband lies asleep, his spear suspended against the wall of the chamber. This is in the Hecuba," and there is a companion to it in the Medea; Glauce drest in her gorgeous attire, rising from her chair and tripping delicately on her white feet, after smiling at herself in the glass as she placed upon her curled hair the golden crown; and there is a grand contrast to it in the Phanissa; '—Capaneus struck by lightning, as he is stepping over the battlement of the tower he has scaled; his body is rent asunder as by a sling; his hair flies upward, his blood gushes downward his hands and feet are whirled round like Ixion's wheel, his bloated corse falls to the ground. 3 2 Hecuba. 919. See the translation of the beautiful chorus in which this picture occurs, by Judge Coleridge, in the Table Talk, p. 244-6, 2nd edit. Horace does not abound in pictures, but there is one at the beginning of his Ode to Bacchus, and another very striking at the end of it. Te vidit insons Cerberus aureo 6 Virgil's description of Venus appearing to her son in the first neid is a true picture. There is a beautiful one of Kailyal in Kehama: There he beholds upon the sand A lovely maiden in the moonlight stand. is wet; Her arms are crost, unconsciously, to fold While statue-like she seems her watch to keep, This might be a pendant to the Ariadne of Catullus : Immemor at juvenis fugiens pellit vada remis, Saxea ut effigies bacchantis prospicit Evæ, &c. There is some fine passionate painting in the second Choral Ode of the Agamemnon. The feeling of the passage, to which I allude, is perhaps conveyed in this free translation, which however departs far enough, I own, from the grand statue-like simplicity and severity of the original. Πάρεστι σῖγ ̓ ἐς ἀτίμους ἀλοίδορος. κ.τ.λ. υ. 380-92.9 He comes and he casts not a curse on their head! 5 Lib. II. Carm. xix. 7 Canto xvii. Baly. 8 Nuptia Pelei et Thetidos. v. 58. 6 En. ver. 314. 9 I should prefer the old reading with Hermann's emendation But through his fond yearning for one that is fled, 10 For he wastes, and his figure, so comely of yore, of olyão, if scholars allowed it,— Πάρεστι σιγὰς, ἄτιμος, ἀλοίδορος, and would render it thus, He comes in silence, unavenged, unreviling, as we might say, no other man was ever seen to take such a thing so sweetly and quietly. Passow gives the word σiyás, and also suggests σιγᾶς Doric for σιγῆς, σιγήεις: but ᾶσ would not correspond to the metre of the antistrophe. I cannot see why ariuos is inapplicable to Menelaus, as Klausen intimates: to Helen it certainly is. Scholefield reads Πάρεστι σῖγ ̓ ἄτιμος, ἀλλ' ἀλοίδορος, my objection to which is that the first verse runs like prose: áλλ áλoídopo, would hardly do in the heart of a choral ode;— for the second line, that apɛμévav does not properly mean gone away but let go, and that it does not carry on the sense of the preceding line so directly and closely as that which I suggest. "And in the yearning sick for her Who now beyond the sea doth roam, A phantasm vain shall seem to sit as queen within "Avaoca is Greek for a Queen, the feminine termination precluding all ambiguity; but would áváσosiv be used by a Greek writer to signify the mere presiding of a queen consort? An English poet would not have used the term reign in such a case. 12 Consider the force of post: is gone, perishes: Eppet тà raλá "her beauty is decayed," or "the luck is gone." How can As the full bright stream when a drought comes on Sinks low declining. In the visions of night He beholds the departed :- And leaves him heavy-hearted; Sadden'd by brief delight! Frail pleasures that vanish when daylight appears, beauty go away from the eyes of busts and statues where it never was?-not to speak of the anachronism of the notion, pointed out by Klausen. His interpretation is far better: "in the want, or loss, which his eyes sustain, all joy of love is lost to him." But I believe that 'Aopodirn, by itself, oftener means beauty than the joys of love. Whether that be so or not, I believe that Eschylus meant simply to say, In the hollows of his eyes all beauty perishes his eye is consumed, like the Psalmist's, for very trouble. : "Man delights not me," says Hamlet, "nor woman neither." A statue consoles not me, says Menelaus, for the loss of a handsome wife! Shade of Æschylus is this, or is it not, a platitude? To say that the ancient chief took no pleasure in bright smiles of deep-zoned maids, or in flowing bowls of rich wine, would be worth saying; but to affirm that he cared little for stony images with eyes that see not, and limbs that move not, and bloodless cheeks, is not much in the spirit of those times, or perhaps of any times. Well! Pygmalion fell in love with a statue, but it was one of his own making; and most of us are apt to conceive a violent affection for our own works, whether they be statuary, poetry or criticism. Perhaps I must "own the soft impeachment" with regard to myself. 1 I know what a host of authorities are against me, yet cannot help understanding verses 382-3-4-5-6, more simply than as the commentators, who are all divided one against another in regard to the exact sense of the passage, understand it. To me it seems a mere expansion of the Psalmist's complaint, My beauty is gone, or mine eye is consumed, for very trouble. Compare with Is. lii. 14, and Psalms xxii. 14-17-xxxi. 10, cii. 3-5, and Lam. iii. 4. The key of it is that expression Paopa. Surely That noble ode of Klopstock's, so admired by Mr. Carlyle, Die beiden Musen, is finely painted: and the Alcaic metre, in which it is written, forces the author into a succintness, and consequent distinctness, wanting, I believe, in his hexameter style. Here are the 4th, 5th, and 12th stanzas attempted in the metre of the original: She views the young, the trembling competitress, Her cheek with glowing roses spread, while The straitened breath her bosom that palpitates, His trump and in transport her eyes are floating. Ah! how I tremble !-O ye undying ones, My light-flowing locks as they stream behind me! either ExOɛTai is corrupt, or it must admit the sense" is alienated from the man;" it seems so plain that it is the state and appearance of Menelaus himself under the influence of sorrow that is described. How animated is the antithesis of spectre-its tenuity and impotence-with reigning!--of the statue-its changeless bulk and symmetry,-with the wasting mourner !-and how naturally follows upon this the description of the sunken eye! For a beautiful eye, in health and gladness, looks not only bright but full; it is like a lucid pool that rises to the edge of its banks, or a shining stream that fills its channel. In sickness and sorrow it seems to have shrunk, like the same pool when it has been drained or dried up, and shines feebly from the bottom of a darksome cavity. Mine eyes fail, says the Psalmist, waiting vainly for comfort from above. Such an interpretation is more simple, sensuous and impassioned, than the forced thought that the wraith of Helen shall seem to reign in the Palace, which Helen herself never did; and the ineffably flat one, that Menelaus hates fine statues because she is absent, and gazes with |