the dawn tragedy. If men were
moved by that, it was from pure, disinterested sympathy. The dawn and
the day were equally good and equally beautiful; the day loved the dawn,
since it pursued her so closely, and the dawn must have loved the day
in return, since she fled so slowly and reluctantly. Why, then, were
they forbidden ever to meet? What mysterious fate condemned the one to
die at the touch of the other--the beloved to elude the lover, the
lover to kill the beloved? This sad, sympathising question, which the
primitive peoples repeated vaguely and perhaps scarce consciously, day
after day, century after century, at length received an answer. One
answer, then another, then yet another, as fancy took more definite
shapes. Yes, the dawn and the morning are a pair of lovers over whom
hangs an irresistible, inscrutable fate--Cephalus and Procris, Alcestis
and Admetus, Orpheus and Eurydice.

And this myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is, to our mind, the most charming
of the tales born of that beautiful, disinterested sympathy for the dawn
and the morning, the one in which the subdued, mysterious pathos of its
origin is most perfectly preserved; in which no fault of infidelity or
jealousy, no final remission of doom, breaks the melancholy unity of
the story. In it we have the real equivalent of that gentle, melancholy
fading away of light into light, of tint into tint. Orpheus loses
Eurydice as the day loses the dawn, because he loves her; she has issued
from Hades as the dawn has issued from darkness; she melts away beneath
her lover's look even as the dawn vanishes beneath the look of the day.

The origin of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is beautiful; the myth
itself, as evolved by spontaneous poetry, is still more so, and more
beautiful still are the forms which have successively been lent it by
the poet, the sculptor, and the musician. Its own charm adds to that
of its embodiments, and the charm of its embodiments adds in return to
its own; a complete circle of beautiful impressions, whose mysterious,
linked power it is impossible to withstand. The first link in the chain
are those lines of Virgil's, for which we would willingly give ten
AEneids, those grandly simple lines, half-hidden in the sweet luxuriance
of the fourth book of the _Georgics_, as the exquisitely chiselled
fragment of some sylvan altar might lie half-hidden among the long
grasses and flowers, beneath the flowering bays and dark ilexes, broken
shadow