strict reproduction, gives an excellent idea of the original.
I.
Oh Love, Love, thou that from the eyes diffusest
Yearning, and on the soul sweet grace inducest—
Souls against whom thy hostile march is made—
Never to me be manifest in ire,
Nor, out of time and tune, my peace invade!
Since neither from the fire—
No, nor the stars—is launched a bolt more mighty
Than that of Aphrodité
Hurled from the hands of Love, the boy with Zeus for sire.
II.
Idly, how idly, by the Alpheian river
And in the Pythian shrines of Phœbus, quiver
Blood-offerings from the bull, which Hellas heaps:
While Love we worship not—the Lord of men!
Worship not him, the very key who keeps
Of Aphrodité, when
She closes up her dearest chamber-portals:
Love, when he comes to mortals,
Wide-wasting, through those deeps of woes beyond the deep!
93. But even where the modern scholar is not able to feel distinctly the music of the metre, there is infinite beauty and variety in the choral odes of Euripides. Thus we find him celebrating the birth and establishment of Apollo at Delphi in an ode (Iphigenia in Tauris, 1234) of the dignity and power of Pindar, to whose style this piece has a strong family likeness. Again the parodos, or opening song of the Supplices (vv. 42 sqq.), is thoroughly Æschylean in tone and conception, and the ode on Ares in the Phœnissæ (v. 784)—an ode very easy to read from its simple dactylic structure—is well worthy of the best of the older masters. The pathetic descriptive odes of the fall of Troy in both Hecuba and the Troades are more peculiar to himself, and masterpieces in their way; where he competes with Sophocles in singing the power of love, or the sad destinies of old age (Hippolytus, 525; Hercules Furens, 637), he seems to me hardly inferior to that acknowledged prince of poets. The last I will quote in full,
