which
rhyme is called in to give its touch of impatient contempt at the folly
of the atheist.

"Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men;
Unless there be who think not God at all.
If any be, they walk obscure;
For of such doctrine never was there school,
But the heart of the fool,
And no man therein doctor but himself."

So ends the first act or episode of the drama. The second is the visit
of Samson's father Manoah, whose cry is--

"Who would be now a father in my stead?"

He is trying to negotiate for his son's ransom: but Samson refuses, not
desiring life, desiring rather to pay the full penalty of his sin. He
cannot share his father's hopes that God will give him back the sight
he so misused--

{235}

"All otherwise to me my thoughts portend,
That these dark orbs no more shall treat with light,
Nor the other light of life continue long,
But yield to double darkness nigh at hand:
So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest."

So Manoah leaves him, and in a noble lyric he laments over his greatest
sufferings, which are not those of the body but those of the mind--

"which no cooling herb
Or med'cinal liquor can assuage,
Nor breath of vernal air from snowy Alp."

A choral song on the mysterious dealings of God closes this episode
which is followed by the most dramatically effective in the poem, that
of the visit of Dalila. The moment the blind man is told that it is
"Dalila, thy wife," he cries--

"My wife! my traitress! let her not come near me:"

and his reply to her offer of penitence, affection and help, begins
with the daringly expressive line--

"Out, out, hyaena! these are thy wonted arts."

A long and telling debate follows, in which {236} Dalila makes very
good points, one of them recalling the scene in which Eve reproaches
Adam for indulging her instead of exercising his right to command and
control the weakness of her sex. To this argument Dalila receives the
stern, characteristically Miltonic reply--

"All wickedness is weakness: that plea, therefore
With God or man will gain thee no remission,"

He refuses her intercession with the Philistine lords, forbids her even
to touch his hand;

"Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance wake
My sudden rag