is uttered by all three-each in his own fashion. In despite of madness, adultery, murder, incest, -in connection with all that is horrible,-in defiance of the very gods, Edipus, Ajax, Medea, Orestes, Antigone, agonize divinely, and, perishing, attain the repose of antique sculpture. The same undertone pervades all this antique music, but is never so obtruded as to be wearisome. Never was the tyranny of circumstance, the inexorable penalties enforced even on the innocent when laws are broken, represented in such wondrous forms. Under such penalties the innocent may perish, but their reward is their very innocence. Even when they lament aloud, when they exclaim against the direness of their doom, these figures lose none of their nobility. In the Philoctetes, the very cries of physical pain are dignified; in the Edipus, the bitterness of the blind sufferer is noble; in the Prometheus, the shriek of triumphant agony is sublime.

These three dramatists uttered the truth as they beheld it; nor do they interfere in any wise with higher interpretations of the same conditions. They used the light of their generation; and the

value of their revelation lies in the sincerity and splendour of the contemporary utterance. The same thing is not to be said again. It was a cry heard early in time; it is an echo haunting the temple of extinct gods. But its truth to humanity is eternal. We have the same agonies to this day, but we regard them differently. All that can be said on the heathen side has been said supremely. While the dramatist depicts the fortunes and questionings of small groups and individuals, the epic poet chronicles the history of the world. It is not every day we can have an epic; for only twice or thrice in time are there materials for an epic. Homer is the historian of the gods, and of the social life under Jove and his peers; through his page blows the fresh breeze of morning, the white tents glimmer on Troy plain, horses neigh and heroes buckle on armour,-while aloft the heavens open, showing the glittering gods on the snowy shoulder of Olympus, Iris darting on the rainbow, whose lower end reddens the grim features of Poseidon, driving his chariot through the foam of the Trojan sea. The passion of the Iliad is anger, the action, war; in the Odyssey, we have

the domestic side of the same life, the softer touches of superstition, the milder influences of gods and goddesses, heroes and their queens. But the life is the same in both--large, primitive, colossal-absorbing all the social and religious significance of a period.

What Homer is to the polytheism of the early Greeks, the Old Testament is to the monotheism of the Hebrews. It is the epic of that life-the wilder, weirder, more spiritual poem of a wilder, weirder, more spiritual period. It is the utterance of many mouths, the poem of many episodes, but the theme is unique, pre-eminent the spirit of the one God, breathing on His chosen peoples, and steadily moving on to fixed consummations foreshadowed in the prophets. We have had no such wondrous epic as this since, and can have none such again. It is the poem of the one God, when yet He was merely a voice in the thundercloud, a breath between the coming and going of the winds.

Where else, in Virgil's time, subsisted the matter for an epic? To sing of Æneas and his fortunes was certainly patriotic, but the subject, at

In

the best, was merely local-a contemporary, not an eternal, theme. The two great forms of early European life had been phrased in the two great early epics; and till Christ taught, the time for the third great poem of masses had not come. point of fact, the third great poem has not yet been written. The New Testament, of course, is didactic, not poetic; and the Paradise Regained of Milton is purely modern and academic.

The fourth European epic is the Divine Comedy of Dante; the fifth and last is the Paradise Lost of Milton. It is scarcely necessary to describe in detail the character of the vision in each of these cases. Dante saw Roman Catholicism as no eye ever saw it before, watched it to its uttermost results, made of it an image enduring by the very intensity of its outlines,--framed of it the epic of the early church. Milton's perfect sight pictured, under latter lights, the wonders of the primeval world. The theme was old, but the light was new; and no man had seen angels till Milton saw them, having been first blinded, that his spiritual sight might be unimpeded.

Thus, all these men,- Homer, the framers of

If

the biblical epos, Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Dante, Milton,-were poets by virtue of having seen some side of truth as no others saw it. some were greater than others, their materials were perhaps greater. Not every one is so situated in time as to see the subject of a new But the Seer" shines

epos, waiting to be sung.

Even Goethe had

in his place, and is content." his truth to utter, and was so far a Seer. He was great in literature, by virtue of his spiritual littleness. It needed such a man to see nature in the cold light of self-worship, to betoken the futility of pure artistic striving. Yet this, at the best, was negative teaching, and so far, inferior.

But, it may be objected, these men surely expressed more than one truth in their generation. In no wise, for each had but one point of view; there was no hovering, no doubting; their gaze was fixed as the gaze of stars. The object is eternal, it is the point of view which changes. Take Milton, for example; the peculiarity of Milton as a Seer is the angelic spirituality of his sight, its rejection of all but perfectly noble types for poetic contemplation. It would seem that,