owever
reasons, persuades, and insists; and at length, very reluctantly,
Admetus gives his hand to the stranger, whom he is then told to unveil.
Herakles has delayed the recognition, that Alkestis might be enabled to
probe her husband's fidelity, and convince herself that sorrow had made
him worthier of her.

Balaustion half recites the play, half describes it, "as she has seen it
at Kameiros this very year," occasionally compressing an unimportant
scene, but always closely adhering to the original. She knows that she
is open to the reproach of describing more than the masked faces of the
actors could allow her to see; but she meets it in these words:--

"What's poetry except a power that makes?
And, speaking to one sense, inspires the rest,
Pressing them all into its service:" (vol. xi. pp. 17, 18.)

The whole work is a vindication of the power of poetry, as exerted in
itself, and as reproduced in those who have received its fruits (pages
110, 111); and Balaustion herself displays it in this secondary form, by
suggesting a version of the story of Alkestis, more subtly, if less
simply, beautiful than the original. She makes _Love_ the conqueror of
Death. According to her, the music made by Apollo among Admetus's flocks
has tamed every selfish passion in the King's soul; and when the time
comes for his wife to die, he refuses the sacrifice. "Zeus has decreed
that their two lives shall be one; and if they must be severed, he must
go who was the body, not she, who was the soul, of their joint
existence." But Alkestis declares that the reality of that existence
lies not in her but in him, and she bids him look at her once more
before his decision is made. In this look, her soul enters into his;
and, thus subduing him, she expires. But when she reaches the nether
world she is rejected as a deceiver. "The death she brings to it is a
mockery, since it doubles the life she has left behind." Proserpine
sends her back to her husband's side; and the "lost eyes" re-open
beneath his gaze, while it still embraces her.

Apollo smiles sadly at the ingenuousness of mortals, who thus imagine
that the chain of eternal circumstance could snap in one human life; at
their blindness to those seeds of pity and tenderness which the crushed
promise of human happiness sets free. Yet he seems to think they lose
nothing by either. "They do well to value their little hour. They do
well to treasure the warm heart's blood, of