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Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

John Milton

47

AN IDYLL1

The place is the Garden of Eden.

N Had in her sober livery all things clad;

came still evening on, and twilight gray

Silence accompanied; for beast and bird,

They to their grassy couch, these to their nests
Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;
She all night long her amorous descant sung;
Silence was pleased: now glowed the firmament
With living sapphires: Hesperus, that led
The starry host, rode brightest, till the moon,
Rising in clouded majesty, at length
Apparent queen, unveiled her peerless light,
And o'er the dark her silver mantle threw.

Eve addresses Adam.

"With thee conversing I forget all time;
All seasons, and their change, all please alike.
Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun,
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glistering with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful evening mild; then silent night,

1 From the fourth book of Paradise Lost.

With this her solemn bird, and this fair moon,
And these the gems of Heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn, when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds; nor rising sun
On this delightful land; nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glistering with dew; nor fragrance after showers;
Nor grateful evening mild; nor silent night,
With this her solemn bird; nor walk by moon,
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet."

John Milton

II

POETICAL DRAMA

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's

pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy

nothing

A local habitation and a name.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

48 THE MEETING OF ELECTRA AND ORESTES1

GAMEMNON, on his return from Troy, was

AGA

murdered in the palace of Mycena by his wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Ægisthus. Orestes, the victim's son and heir, then a child, was saved by his sister Electra. She gave him to a faithful retainer, who carried him to Phocis. There he grew up in the home of Strophius, King of Crisa near Delphi, the father of his friend Pylades.

Many years have passed since then. Electra has
perforce continued to live under the same roof with
the murderers. While her sisters, Chrysothemis and
Iphianassa, have been taught by prudence to hide
their feelings, she has made no concealment of her
loyalty to her father's memory, or of her inconsolable
grief. Every kind of hardship and of insult is her
portion at the hands of her mother and the dastardly
Ægisthus; no slave could fare worse than she does
in the house that was her father's.

One hope alone has hitherto borne her up that
the brother from whom she parted so long ago would
be sent back by the gods as an avenger.
But this,
too, has failed her. An old man—a messenger, he
says, from Phanoteus the Phocian, a great ally of
Ægisthus has just arrived at the palace with news
of Orestes' death. Men of Phocis, he says, are even
now bearing to the fatherland the ashes of the noble
youth. Electra, sorrowing but undismayed, boldly
resolves, Chrysothemis refusing help, to become, her-
self alone, the instrument of divine vengeance.

The news, however, is false. The old man is not
a messenger from Phanoteus, but the loyal servant to
whose care Electra entrusted her father's child. He

1 From the tragedy of Electra. The translation is by Lewis Campbell, and is reprinted with the permission of the Oxford University Press. The exposition of events preceding the scene reprinted is adapted--with the permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press-from the note prefixed by Richard Jebb, in The Tragedies of Sophocles, to his prose version of the play.

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