To meet in your dread chambers all my kindred,
Who in dark multitudes have crowded down
Where Proserpine received the dead. But I,
The last--and oh how few more miserable!--
Go down, or ere my sands of life are run.

And let me ask you whether the contemplation of such a self-sacrifice
should draw you, should have drawn those who heard the tale nearer
to, or farther from, a certain cross which stood on Calvary some 1800
years ago? May not the tale of Antigone heard from mother or from
nurse have nerved ere now some martyr-maiden to dare and suffer in an
even holier cause?

But to return. This set purpose of the Athenian dramatists of the
best school to set before men a magnified humanity, explains much in
their dramas which seems to us at first not only strange but faulty.
The masks which gave one grand but unvarying type of countenance to
each well-known historic personage, and thus excluded the play of
feature, animated gesture, and almost all which we now consider as
"acting" proper; the thick-soled cothurni which gave the actor a more
than human stature; the poverty (according to our notions) of the
scenery, which usually represented merely the front of a palace or
other public place, and was often though not always unchanged during
the whole performance; the total absence, in fact, of anything like
that scenic illusion which most managers of theatres seem now to
consider as their highest achievement; the small number of the
actors, two, or at most three only, being present on the stage at
once,--the simplicity of the action, in which intrigue (in the
playhouse sense) and any complication of plot are utterly absent; all
this must have concentrated not the eye of the spectator on the
scene, but his ear upon the voice, and his emotions on the personages
who stood out before him without a background, sharp-cut and clear as
a group of statuary, which is the same, place it where you will,
complete in itself--a world of beauty, independent of all other
things and beings save on the ground on which it needs must stand.
It was the personage rather than his surroundings, which was to be
impressed by every word on the spectator's heart and intellect; and
the very essence of Greek tragedy is expressed in the still famous
words of Medea:

Che resta? Io.

Contrast this with the European drama--especially with the highest
form of it--our own Elizabethan. It resembles, as has been often
said in better words than