mility and self-knowledge.

Look at Baccheion's beauty opposite,
The temple with the pillars at the porch!
See you not something beside masonry?
What if my words wind in and out the stone
As yonder ivy, the God's parasite?
Though they leap all the way the pillar leads,
Festoon about the marble, foot to frieze,
And serpentiningly enrich the roof,
Toy with some few bees and a bird or two,--
What then? The column holds the cornice up.

As the ivy is to the pillar that supports the cornice, so are her words
to the _Alkestis_ on which she comments.

That is her charming way. She also is, like Pompilia, young. But no
contrast can be greater than that between Pompilia at seventeen years of
age and Balaustion at fifteen. In Greece, as in Italy, women mature
quickly. Balaustion is born with that genius which has the experience of
age in youth and the fire of youth in age. Pompilia has the genius of
pure goodness, but she is uneducated, her intelligence is untrained, and
her character is only developed when she has suffered. Balaustion, on
the contrary, has all the Greek capacity, a thorough education, and that
education also which came in the air of that time to those of the
Athenian temper. She is born into beauty and the knowledge of it, into
high thinking and keen feeling; and she knows well why she thought and
how she felt. So finely wrought is she by passion and intelligence
alike, with natural genius to make her powers tenfold, that she sweeps
her kinsfolk into agreement with her, subdues the sailors to her will,
enchants the captain, sings the whole crew into energy, would have, I
believe, awed and enthralled the pirate, conquers the Syracusans,
delights the whole city, draws a talent out of the rich man which she
leaves behind her for the prisoners, is a dear friend of sombre
Euripides, lures Aristophanes, the mocker, into seriousness, mates
herself with him in a whole night's conversation, and wrings praise and
honour from the nimblest, the most cynical, and the most world-wise
intellect in Athens.

Thus, over against Pompilia, she is the image of fine culture, held back
from the foolishness and vanity of culture by the steadying power of
genius. Then her judgment is always balanced. Each thing to her has many
sides. She decides moral and intellectual questions and action with
justice, but with mercy to the wrong opinion and the wrong thing,
because her intellect is clear,