e to tear thee joint by joint,"

and drives her to remind him defiantly that, whatever he and his
Hebrews may say of her, she appeals to another tribunal of fame--

"In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath,
I shall be named among the famousest
Of women, sung at solemn festivals,
Living and dead recorded."

So she goes out, and the Chorus make Miltonic meditations on the
unhappiness of marriage and the divinely appointed subjection of women.

The next visitor is Harapha, the Philistine giant, who comes to taunt
Samson, and is defied by him to mortal combat. This {237} episode is
perhaps the least interesting, but it advances the action by exhibiting
Samson's returning sense that God is still with him and will yet do
some great work through him. It fitly leads to the chorus--

"O, how comely it is, and how reviving
To the spirits of just men long oppressed,
When God into the hands of their deliverer
Puts invincible might,
To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor,
The brute and boisterous force of violent men,
Hardy and industrious to support
Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue
The righteous and all such as honour truth!"

In the next scene an officer comes to demand Samson's presence at the
feast of Dagon that he may entertain the Philistine lords with feats of
strength. He at first dismisses the messenger with a contemptuous
refusal: but, with a premonition of the end which recalls Oedipus at
Colonus, he suddenly changes his mind--

"I begin to feel
Some rousing motions in me, which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts.
If there be aught of presage in the mind,
This day will be remarkable in my life
By some great act, or of my days the last."

{238}

"Go, and the Holy One
Of Israel be thy guide,"

sing the Chorus: and he leaves the scene, like Oedipus, to return no
more, but to be more felt in his absence than in his presence. Manoah
re-enters to utter his further hopes of ransom, in which there is a
note of Sophoclean irony recalling the ignorant optimism of Oedipus in
the _Tyrannus_; and as he and the Chorus talk they hear at first a loud
shouting, apparently of triumph, and then another louder and more
terrible--

_Manoah._

"O what noise!
Mercy of Heaven! what hideous noise was that?
Horribly loud, unlike the former shout."

_Chorus._

"Noise call you it, or universal groan,
As if the whole inhabitation perished?"