e rock-hewn Place of Assembly,
whence new orators may thunder over Greece; and the theatre where
AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, godlike still, may contend for the
prize. Yet--and there is a further change of thought--yet that may not
be. To build that poetic vision is to slip away from reality, and the
true use of it. The tragedy is there--irrevocable. Let it sink deep in
us till we see Rhodes shining over the sea. So great, so terrible, so
piteous it is, that, dwelt on in the soul and seen in memory, it will do
for us what the great tragedians made their tragic themes do for their
hearers. It will purify the heart by pity and terror from the baseness
and littleness of life. Our small hatreds, jealousies and prides, our
petty passions will be rebuked, seem nothing in its mighty sorrow.

What else in life seems piteous any more
After such pity, or proves terrible
Beside such terror;

This is the woman--the finest creature Browning drew, young and fair and
stately, with her dark hair and amber eyes, lovely--the wild pomegranate
flower of a girl--as keen, subtle and true of intellect as she is
lovely, able to comment on and check Euripides, to conceive a new play
out of his subject, to be his dearest friend, to meet on equality
Aristophanes; so full of lyric sympathy, so full of eager impulse that
she thrills the despairing into action, enslaves a city with her
eloquence, charms her girl-friends by the Ilissus, and so sends her
spirit into her husband that, when the Spartans advise the razing of
Athens to the ground he saves the city by those famous lines of
Euripides, of which Milton sang; so at one with natural beauty, with all
beauty, that she makes it live in the souls of men; so clear in judgment
that she sees the right even when it seems lost in the wrong, that she
sees the justice of the gods in the ruin of the city she most loved; so
poetic of temper that everything speaks to her of life, that she
acknowledges the poetry which rises out of the foulness she hates in
Aristophanes, that she loves all humanity, bad or good, and Euripides
chiefly because of his humanity; so spiritual, that she can soar out of
her most overwhelming sorrow into the stormless world where the gods
breathe pure thought and for ever love; and, abiding in its peace, use
the griefs of earth for the ennoblement of the life of men, because in
all her spiritual apartness, however far it bear her from earth, she
never loses her clos