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visitors of Cremorne, they are merely exceptional "reversions to long-lost characters." The prickles, and the scales, and the pig-face, and the wool, exist in posse in the case of every one of us-each an inherited peculiarity from some one of those "four or five common progenitors" whom we share with the rest of the animal creation. Long ears have always been jestingly assumed to betray some asinine qualities; they become a very serious fact after reading Mr Darwin. The bear, if he takes to the water for successive generations, becoming more and more aquatic in his structure and habits," may result in a whale-like animal,* it is argued; so the mermaids whom the old voyagers saw, and in whom we rudely disbelieve, may only have been highly aquatic young ladies in a state of transition. Winged horses and chimeras, Virgil's Tritons, Dagon of the Philistines, are no

*Origin of Species,' p. 184.

longer fables, but the lost intermediate stages of development which Mr Darwin failed to find. There is a perch at the present day who climbs trees: any one who takes the trouble to look into Mr Gosse's 'Romance of Natural History,' may see him there (pictorially) half-way up a palm-tree; and Mr E. Layard met several "travelling along a hot dusty gravel road in the mid-day sun." They must be developing into squirrels fast, by this time. There may, no doubt, be a certain amount of self-love at the bottom of the unbelief, which refuses to accept the conclusion that we ourselves are the result of a longcontinued natural selection," successive slight favourable variations," from the very best monkeys; but we cannot help thinking that careful and accurate contributions to the facts of science are far more valuable than the cleverest speculations.

66

by

+'Annals of Nat. Hist.' May 1853.

STANZAS TO WORDSWORTH.

Like solitary branch of oak or elm,
Torn off in early summer, when the year
Was greenest, orphaned in the forest-realm,
The whispered by-word of each sylvan peer;
Which all despairingly, some few days' length,
While the sap dwindles to a scantiest tear,
Feeds a dead life with its inherent strength-

Too soon, alas! the brittle blackening leaves
Shrivel their veiny network, once so fair;
No more that lost bough pleasant tune receives,
But harsh and hollow, from the idling air;
And nerves once quick to pleasure and to pain
Wholly forget the sunlight's fostering care,
Wholly the sweet dews and the mellowing rain-

Such did I fondly deem myself, but thou
Hast taught me with new forms to over-write
That fatal old imperious blank, and now
Find I companionship as wide as light,
True sympathetic rapture, which distils
There on the spirit's most harmonious height
Rich revelations from the stars and hills.

There that good Faculty doth build her nest,
A refuge from self-waste, and hourly reaps
Wholesome vicissitude and boon unrest

In other haunts than where the gross world sleeps;
Whence she discerns that Earth's dumb-seeming sphere
Heaves warm with pulses from its deepest deeps,
And mighty voices large with love doth rear.

Each wind, its own majestic cadence pouring,
Wanders articulate the realms of air;

In the great zone of waters, hushed or warring,
Lives language that no centuries outwear;
And, with peculiar poesies endued,

Each hour can answer speculations rare

With master-meanings culled in solitude.

This thou hast taught me, this art teaching still.
My new-found nature quaffs the piercing rain
Shed from thee, and is moulded at thy will
To read high matter in a simple strain.

Thrice blest who owned thee early for their seer,
Who, finding thy sweet fountains not in vain,
Preached the remedial virtue far and near!

Well said the Greek that universal earth
Buries the brave, and is their monument;
But death to thee hath been an ampler birth,
Whereby thy being with mankind is blent.
Graved on men's hearts thine epitaph lasts long.
Now are those hard lips learning to repent,
Who scorned thee once, the Nazarene of song.

Even when we wept, a little while ago,
Unfaithful, that thy place knew thee no more,
The mental essence, moving to and fro,
Flashed in our eyes thy renovated lore,
And filled all corners with instinctive truth.
He errs who tells us that thy life is o'er,
Nor reads all round him thine eternal youth.

Therefore to thee whose bones God's call await
In that fair earth whereof thy poet-power
The lapsed significance did intimate,

And clothe each herb and individual flower
With music and thine own life's noblest part,
I, a weak proselyte, love's simple dower
Offer not worthless from a poor man's heart-

Yea, thanks and love for that serener code
Which, in a safe and stormless avenue,
Teaches the humble to interpret God,

Which even by exaltation can subdue,
Chasten, and thrill with light those evil dreams
Which made life's heavier meaning seem the true,
And change this desert to a land of streams.

O to what height advanced were we, now low,
Could we but once inform with that great light
Our tyrant strengthlessness-the ebb and flow
Of objectless desire-yea, boldly smite
Custom, that old usurper, who doth draw
All nations in his net by lordly right,
Not by true service and kind wisdom's law!

We fail; but thou, alike in youth and age,
Calm-browed with patience, like a Phidiac god,
Satst loftily withdrawn from vulgar rage,
Not faithless, though thy fellows left untrod
Stairs of thy building.-O large heart and brave,
Stars are thy raiment, not this lowly sod.
Gazing on heaven I gaze upon thy grave!

P. S. WORSLEY.

66

IPHIGENIA IN AULIS.

SOME thirty years ago, the future bard of Elaine and Guinevere wandered into a most delectable wood, a wood accessible to bards (actual or potential) only. He was there recompensed with a recompense meet for him who was to deserve by his strains, from no mean judge, the title of "The Poet of Woman." Especially, doubtless, was regard had to the great benefit he was one day to confer on the women of his own and of the generations to come, by the noble conclusion of his 'Princess.' It was given to him there to behold "the star-like sorrows of" the "immortal eyes" of Helen; to gaze on many other renowned beauties of ancient times, and not to gaze only, but to hold converse with them. His reverence for the fair and the unhappy precluded his making the fullest use of this great opportunity. He did not dare to ask Helen whether she left Greece willingly or unwillingly. He left all researches into the true meaning of ' Ελένης όρμηματά τε στοναχάς Tin Homer to the acuteness of Mr Gladstone. But the soft accents which met his ear were not the voice of the degraded Helen of Euripides or Virgil; they were rather (as meet for the ear of so true a poet) like to the speech of the Homeric Helen of her who, if innocent, forgets her own wrongs in the sorrows they have caused to the people who have adopted her; who, if we are compelled to believe her guilty, is yet irresistibly winning in her gentle penitence. His next vision set before him one whom all ages have agreed to pity. Greatly as authorities differ concerning the details of her story, her story itself is one of the best known of antiquity.

It is not likely that the young gentleman, who, being asked by his sister (à propos of the Laureate's last gem, Tithonus'), "Who was Aurora's husband?" answered so ingeniously, "Borealis, to be sure!-you know she is Aurora Borealis," has ever been asked, "Who was Agamemnon's eldest daughter?" or been called upon to name the speaker of these three exquisite stanzas :

27.

"I was cut off from hope in that sad place, Which yet to name my spirit loathes and

fears:

My father held his hand upon his face ; I, blinded with my tears,

28.

Still strove to speak: my voice was thick with sighs

As in a dream. Dimly I could descry The stern black-bearded kings, with wolfish eyes, Waiting to see me die.

29.

The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat, The temples, and the people, and the

shore ;

One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat

Slowly-and nothing more."

But still, if there are many Helens, there are more Iphigenias; and we may allowably ask, which of them we have here. Homer's? Certainly not. Homer's "Iphianassa” is one of the three daughters of Agamemnon (of whom only one bears the same name in the 'Iliad' as in the Tragedians'), any one of whom he offers as a bride to Achilles, when wishing to disarm his wrath, in the ninth book of the 'Iliad':

“ Τρεῖς δέ μοι εἰσὶ θύγατρες ἐνὶ μεγάρῳ ἐϋπήκτῳ,

Χρυσόθεμις, καὶ Λαοδίκη, καὶ Ιφιάνασσα·
Τάων, ἣν κ' ἐθέλῃσι, φίλην ἀνάεδνον
ἀγέσθω
Πρὸς οἶκον Πηλῆος.”

I quote this third stanza unaltered from the old edition, as I do not think its later form an improvement. And I take this opportunity of expressing my hope that Mr Tennyson may be moved by those "third thoughts," which he has lately told us are a kind of "second-first," better than actual second thoughts, to repace it.

"(Yet more-three daughters in my court

are bred,

And each well worthy of a royal bed;
Laodice and Iphigenia* fair,

And bright Chrysothemis with golden hair;

Her let him choose whom most his eyes approve :

I ask no presents, no reward for love."+) And this was ten years after the supposed sacrifice! Had Homer adopted the legend followed by the tragic poets, with what scorn would he have made Achilles reject any offer like this!-declaring that one promised wife treacherously slaughtered was enough for him, and that he shrank from grasping in affinity a father's hand reddened with his own child's blood! Nor in the 'Odyssey,' when Ulysses beholds in the thick Cimmerian gloom the shades of the famous women of other days, does any daughter of Agamemnon stand before him, bewailing her untimely death. To him whose "tale of Troy divine" enraptures each succeeding generation, all the crimes of "Thebes or Pelops' line," were not known as they were to Eschylus and to Sophocles. As he presents the pale shade of their Jocaste (Epicaste he calls her) to Ulysses, with but imperfect knowledge of the evils which flowed from her fatal marriage, so, rehearsing more than once in the 'Odyssey,' how mighty Agamemnon fell by domestic treachery, he omits the wretched Clytemnestra's one solitary excuse for her crime, that the hand which struck her husband struck her daughter's murderer. Such is the excuse which both Eschylus and Sophocles put into her mouth; and I need not add that it is their Iphigenia who appeared to the future Laureate. So, too, the hapless maiden of the 'Vision of Fair Women is the Iphigenia of Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius. The lines in which the latter describes her sad fate are well known :

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Perfecto, posset claro comitari Hymenæo; Sed casta inceste, nubendi tempore in ipso, Hostia concideret mactatu mosta parentis, Exitus ut classi felix faustusque daretur."

But not to linger over these incidental notices, our main idea of the fair maid doomed to die-according to one poet,§ to accomplish a thoughtless vow of her father's-according to another, to atone for his transgression in the chase-is derived from the noble 'Iphigenia in Aulis' of Euripides. This great play is best known to that increasingly large portion of the reading public, who are unable to consult the classics for themselves, by the celebrated imitation of Racine. Perhaps such may wish to know how far the French tragedian has closely followed, and in what respects surpassed, or fallen short of, his ancient model. Assuming them to be already familiar with Racine's play, an analysis of its Greek original, with a few attempts to translate its most striking passages, may enable them to judge of this.

The Iphigenia in Aulis' then, opens like Racine's 'Iphigénie' by a dialogue between the mighty Agamemnon and a trusty follower. Only the Arcas of Racine is lost in a slave, whose namelessness reminds

I suppose I need not wain my readers not to pronounce "Iphigenia" as Pope does. But I hope they will be charitable, and remember his mistake, when they next hear an illiterate friend make the same.

+ Pope's Homer.'

§ Eur. 'Ipig. in Tauris,' line 20.

Lucretius, book i.
Soph. Elec.,' line 566.

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