and with inbred nobility she resigns all her fond hopes of life, to assume the loftier position of a national benefactress. It is not easy to say which of her two great speeches, her childlike supplication (1211 sqq.), or her patriotic self-devotion (1368 sqq.) is the finer. She then deprecates the chivalrous offers of Achilles to defend her, and turns to give her last moments to her mother and the infant Orestes. Nothing can. be more purely womanly and deeply affectionate than this parting. She anticipates her mother's implacable wrath against Agamemnon, and prays her to forgive him. She does not even utter the just complaint against Helen which Tennyson puts into her mouth in his Dream of Fair Women. But she passes again at the end into lyrical excitement, this time of a religious character, as she devotes herself to the goddess whose wrath required so great a sacrifice. With an appeal to the sun and the light of day she leaves the stage.
I need hardly say one word in illustration of this magnificent conception of a gay, affectionate, heedless maiden, just entering upon the highest delights of a splendid life, passing by a sudden crisis into the depths of despair, and then, by one of those momentous changes which only such a crisis can produce, into a sad and mature heroine, in whom noble unselfishness has replaced the gaiety and exuberance of her vanished childhood. But she never ceases to love life; unlike the slave Polyxena, or the exile Macaria, she has everything to lose, and hence she cannot go to her death, as they do, with calm resolve, but with that burning excitement which has sustained the most sensitive, and therefore the greatest martyrs. When Sophocles has given the same feature, this wild excitement at the approach of death, to his stronger and more masculine Antigone, he has not, I think, been so consistent in his drawing of character.
67. Alcestis.—But we have not yet concluded our Euripidean portraits of female heroism. There
