Nor hush my bitter cries, while yet I gaze Gaze on the orb of day;— But, like the hapless nightingale, bereft Of her loved brood, before my native home Ye dark abodes of Dis and Proserpine, Thou Hermes, guide to Hell-thou Awful Curse, Who on the basely murdered look, On those who mount by stealth th' unhallowed couch; Of my beloved sire, And give my absent brother to mine arms; Vol. II. pp. 291, 2. We see no difficulty in the nightingale's being called Aos αγγελος, the messenger of Jove, as announcing to mortals by her melody the approach of spring; or, as the Scholiast well puts it, δι' αυτής ο Ζευς το ἔαρ ερμηνευι. The speech in which Electra remonstrates with her sister for consenting to make offerings for her mother at the tomb of the murdered Agamemnon, is admirably translated. Elec. Nay, dearest sister! of these offerings nought It is not pious from that woman-fiend To the wild winds, or hide them in the dust, And this my zone, unwrought with regal pomp. And that Orestes with more vigorous hand pp. 310-12. Ajax is the least pleasing of the plays of Sophocles. The voluntary death of the hero, like the suicides of Euripides, is undignified. There is something repulsive, too, in his madness; but no picture of the agony of a restoration to reason, equals that in the Ajax, where the tent opens, and discovers the hero seated on the ground, in the midst of the sheep he had slain during his delirium, and filling the air with the groans of his unutterable anguish. We pass by the Trachinia. Has Mr. Dale no suspicion of its not being from the hand of Sophocles? In its general execution, it is decidedly below the other dramas of this great poet. Nor do we recognise in this tragedy, the heroic cast of character which the bard of Colonos preserved so faithfully and consistently. Hercules is a miserable specimen of the hero. Many critics have observed also, and with much reason, upon the superfluous soliloquy of Dejanira, at the beginning, as not bearing the slightest resemblance to the Poet's manner of prologising. It must be admitted on the other hand, that it was never attributed to any other author, and Cicero cites the lamentation of Hercules as a passage from the plays of Sophocles. Were we called upon to declare which of the tragedies of Sophocles we deem the best, we should be inclined to pronounce the Philoctetes the most perfect, as it certainly is the most captivating. It has a concise and simple fable, for it is nothing more than the stratagem of Ulysses to wrest, by the aid of Neoptolemus, the invulnerable arms from the custody of Philoctetes. This unhappy man, to whom Hercules had bequeathed them in reward of his fidelity, had repaired with the Greeks to the siege of Troy, where he received a deadly wound in his foot, from an arrow which had been tinged with the venom of the Lernaan hydra. So noisome was the odour exhaling from his wound, that his presence in the camp became intolerable. He was therefore enticed by Ulysses on board a galley, under the false pretext of having his wound cured by the sons of Esculapius, and treacherously left on a desert part of the isle of Lemnos. In this state of corporal pain and mental deso lation, the wretched son of Paas has already lingered nine years, when Ulysses and Neoptolemus, deputed by the Grecian chiefs to convey him to Troy, which cannot be taken without his assistance, arrive at Lemnos. At this point begins the drama. If there be any spectacle,' remarks Mr. Dale in his critical summary of this Tragedy, peculiarly interesting to the observer of human nature, it is the contemplation of a generous mind reluctantly yielding to the suggestions of artifice and duplicity; and though seduced, for a moment, by the love of glory, into the commission of baseness, yet struggling with better feelings, till at last the native integrity of the honourable mind rises triumphant over the arts of the deceiver. Such a character is Neoptolemus. Young, ingenuous, and upright, he recoils with indignation from the smooth sophistry of artifice and fraud-he is only reconciled to it by the specious lure of fame-he perseveres in the deceit so long as he is encouraged by the presence of his wily confederate; but when left to himself-to the silent remonstrances of conscience-the innate generosity of his heart resumes its ascendancy, nor can he consent to purchase his own glory and the welfare of Greece, at the price of his honour. We recognize in him all the lineaments of that high-souled and impetuous chief, to whom is attributed, by the Master-poet, that memorable sentiment ; • Who dares think one thing, and another tell, Scarcely less interesting, though under a very different aspect, is the character of Philoctetes himself. The lonely exile has become familiarized to misery without being resigned to it; all around him has assumed the desolate aspect of his own forlorn condition, and yet, without any hope of deliverance, the remembrance of his own country is the more endeared to him, as he is separated from it by a more hopeless and insuperable barrier. The Amor patria' burns inextinguishably in his heart. The very garb of Greece is beauty to his eye; the accents of a Greek are music to his ear. Absorbed as he might have been in the contemplation of his own sorrows, (and there is no teacher of selfishness like sorrow,) he has not yet forgotten his former companions and confederates in arms, and his enquiries after them are urged with a tenderness and solicitude truly pathetic. Even the misanthropic scepticism which he has imbibed, is accordant with the general tone and temper of his mind; and, under such circumstances, a heathen may be excused for calling in question the impartiality and justice of the gods. It was reserved for a more enlightened poet than Sophocles to deliver that beautiful aphorism All partial evil-universal good. This drama, however, possesses a beauty peculiar to itself. Scenic descriptions of the utmost richness and luxuriance are, indeed, interspersed throughout all the writings of Sophocles, but the drama be fore us presents by far the finest specimen of his descriptive talent. With admirable judgement he has put the delineation of the surrounding wildness and desolation into the mouth of Philoctetes, the sombre temper of whose mind would necessarily invest it with additional gloom. Indeed, throughout the whole drama, the prevailing charm is Nature; and however destitute it may be of that which is calculated to gratify the sickly and vitiated taste of a modern audience, the ravings of guilty passion, and the declamation of tumid and unnatural heroism, we do not hesitate to maintain, that so long as natural feeling, correct delineation, a lively exhibition of human character, and an intimate knowledge of the human heart, possess the power awakening interest and exciting the affections, that power will belong, in an eminent degree, to the Philoctetes of Sophocles.' pp. 177-80. of To see familiar objects for the last time,-to hear the sounds which in a short time we shall hear no more,-to bid adieu to streams, to trees and rocks, with which our eye has been familiarized, inspires not unfrequently regrets as acute as those which are felt in the severer separations of life. In the solitude of Philoctetes, he naturally adopts into the narrow, desolate circle of his friendships, the mute and inanimate objects around him. This disposition of mind Sophocles has portrayed so exquisitely, that it may be considered as one of the most striking beauties of the Philoctetes. He must be strangely constituted, who can read unmoved the parting words which he addresses to the fountains and woods from which he was about to be torn. We must, by the way, intimate to Mr. Dale, that whether the island of Lemnos was uninhabited or not, (Homer calls the town Λήμνον, εὐκτίμενον πτολίεθρον, well-built,) is a question of little consequence. It might have been deserted when Philoctetes was carried thither, or Sophocles assumed it to be uninhabited, in order to give a gloomier grandeur to his drama. It is evident, however, that the very structure of the piece falls to the ground, if we suspect it to have been inhabited. The plan sets out with the contrary supposition. Ulysses says immediately on his arrival, This is the shore of that sea-circled land, Nor is Mr. Dale's a plausible supposition, that only the part of the island where Philoctetes was left, was uninhabited; for in so small an island, every part must have been, in that case, occasionally visited. Other critics have inferred from another part of the play, viz. Philoctetes' parting address, that there was a fountain named Auxios, Lycius, dedicated to Apollo in the island, who would not have had worshippers if the place had been uninhabited. But this error arose from the tasteless reading of Brunck, Λυκιον τε ποτον, for γλυκιον τε ποτον. The despair of Philoctetes excites more compassion than that of Ajax. To endure and to live even under the heaviest weight of calamity, exhibits a moral dignity of a much loftier species, than self-immolation, which is the refuge of the coward. Philoctetes moreover had severer ills to sustain. Nothing can equal the noble passage in which Philoctetes, turning away with loathing and abhorrence from the men who are betraying him, returns with redoubled affection to the mute companions of his exile, who know no treachery ;-to the cavern, the rock, the plants, to whom he has so long breathed his complaints, and whom he has taught himself to address as the friends of his misfortune. He invokes the island and its volcanic mountain; he calls them to witness the new perfidy that is practised upon him, and when he laments the loss of his bow, attributes to it an affectionate sorrow for being torn from him. We must conclude our extracts with the valedictory anapæsts in which Philoctetes takes leave of the external scenery amidst which he had sojourned. 'Phi. Come, as we go, this earth will I adore, Ye nymphs who haunt the watery meads, Thou wild roar of the hoarse resounding sea, Where oft within my cave The southern blast in hoary dews Has bathed my head; while many a bitter groan Sent in wild murmurs on the echoing blast! An unexpected joy! Farewell, thou sea-encircled Lemnian plain O speed me with a prosperous course Where Fate's resistless will-and the kind words Vol. II. pp. 273, 4. After such copious citations, it cannot be necessary for us We to say much on the merits of Mr. Dale's translation. have no hesitation in giving it as our opinion, that he has attained the end which he proposed to himself in the arduous task of conveying to English readers, a spirited, easy, flowing, yet, as nearly as possible, literal translation of the tragedies of Sophocles. The elegance and spirit of the original must necessarily disappear in any translation conducted with verbal ex |