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Semele, and mother of the King Pentheus, followed him in his wild rites upon the hills. Even the ancient Cadmus and Teiresias took the thyrsus in their hands and set the ivy-wreath upon their heads. Here is a chant of the Bacchanal maidens:

Where is the Home for me? O Cyprus, set in the sea, Aphrodite's home In the soft sea-foam, Would I could wend to thee; Where the wings of the Loves are furled,

And faint the heart of the world.

Aye, or to Paphos' isle,

Where the rainless meadows smile With riches rolled From the hundredfold

Mouths of the far-off Nile,
Streaming beneath the waves
To the roots of the sea-ward caves.

But a better land is there Where Olympus cleaves the air, The high still dell Where the Muses dwell,

Fairest of all things fair!

O there is Grace, and there is the Heart's Desire,

And peace to adore thee, thou Spirit

of Guiding Fire!

Only King Pentheus will not hear; and calls the stranger before him, and lays gyves upon him. And the god sends a frenzy upon Pentheus, and leads him to spy out the revels on Cithaeron, and there at the bidding of Dionysus he is taken by the inspired women and torn limb from limb. In one of the best critical essays known to us, Prof. Murray endeavors to elucidate the bearings of Euripides' thought in this difficult and enigmatic play. In one of its aspects it is clearly like much that he wrote, an impeachment of the divinity.

The sympathy of the audience is with Dionysus while he is persecuted; doubtful while he is just taking his vengeance; utterly against him at the

end of the play. . . . The most significant point against Dionysus is its change of tone-the conversion, one might almost call it, of his own inspired "Wild Beasts," the Chorus of Asiatic Bacchanals, after the return of Agâvê with her son's severed head. The change is clearly visible in that marvellous scene itself. It is emphasized in the sequel. Those wild singers, who raged so loudly in praise of the god's vengeance before they saw what it was, fall, when once they have And seen it, into dead silence. . . . they go off at the end with no remark, good or evil, about their triumphant and hateful Dionysus, uttering only those lines of brooding resignation with which Euripides closed so many of his tragedies.

On the other hand, there is equally clear in the play an attempt to find expression in the symbols and utterances of the Dionysus-worship for certain aspirations and ideals, which had come, at the gray end of his vexed life, to be Euripides' own. In the cool of the hills, away from the bad dream of a disillusioned Athens, he had grown, as the whole of Greek thought shortly after him was to grow, to look for glimpses of the joy and truth of life, not in the wisdom of civilization, but in the content of a soul which has accepted the harmony of nature, and holds the key to some of her intimacies.

Knowledge, we are not foes!
I seek thee diligently:
But the world with a great wind
blows,

Shining, and not from thee;
Blowing to beautiful things,
On amid dark and light,
Till Life through the trammellings
Of Laws that are not the Right,
Breaks, clean and pure, and sings
Glory to God in the height!

The quotations which we have given will serve to show the quality of Prof. Murray's translation. It seems to us

very remarkable indeed. He is one of the very few translators whose work gives the effect, not of a translation at all, but of a substantive poem. More than adequate in the dialogue, he rises at times in the lyrics to heights of quite extraordinary felicity. We do not believe that he has ever published a volume of poems, but it is impossible that he should have none of his own to give us. As a translator, his method is audacious, and fully justifies itself by its success. First, he tells us, came "close study of the letter, and careful tracking of the spirit by means of its subtleties." This took shape in translations or paraphrases made for lecture use, which were "prose, stilted and long-winded prose, and the original is gleaming poetry." Then comes the second part of the task. "The groundwork of careful translation once laid, I have thought no more about anything but the poetry." The course has its The Academy.

pitfalls, and Prof. Murray fears that many scholars will think that he has made Euripides too "modern."

My answer is that, if in a matter of scholarship, it is well to be "safe" or even to "hedge," in a matter of Art any such cowardice is fatal. I have in my own mind a fairly clear conception of what I take to be the spirit of Euripides, and I have kept my hands very free in trying to get over it.

We should add that the one thing which has been most effectually borne in upon our minds in reading this book is that Euripides precisely is "modern." After all, the world has not moved very much, in essentials, since the fifth century B.C. We have the electric light, and we can no longer paint vases. But those are details, and the problems and the unrest of Euripides are still our problems and our unrest.

LADY MAUD'S WALK.

I am full of problems. Last Sunday afternoon there were most certainly eight of them in that wooden box under the yew hedge, and now there are but two; and yet no human hand has touched bowl or jack in the interval. Six days have passed since then and with each day, or anyhow for each, has disappeared one round plaything. It is just so restful and sufficient an enquiry as is suited to the afternoon of a Sunday in July and to Lady Maud's Walk. Let me smoke a cigarette while I think it out. The one great objection to perfect comfort is that one has to move when one wants to do anything, and a man recumbent on many cushions has much difficulty in finding his

matches. Ah, here they are, and now to thinking again.

What was I thinking about? How odd it is that I never can remember anything in the country. Oh yes, it was the bowls. They have certainly disappeared, and as certainly I have not moved them, nor has anyone else. It seems almost as though they have been spirited away. Can Lady Maud have taken them, and if so what can she have wanted with them? It must be five centuries since her fair brow was wrinkled over the problem, still unsolved by her sex, as to what bias is and how you obtain the benefit of it. I don't know either, but then I am a dweller in cities and cannot be ex

skulls.

pected to know about rural pastimes. think of trivialities, be they bowls or If I lived permanently in the neighborhood of a bowling-green I think I would try to find out. I dare say I am perpetrating a historical crime in mentioning Lady Maud and bowls in the same breath. Were they invented in her day? How helpless a creature is man without his books! But they must have been, for what is it the King of Hungary says when he is devising schemes for his daughter's amusement?

An hundred knightes, truly tolde, Shall play with bowles in alayes colde.

But it does not follow that Lady Maud knows a bowl when she sees it; she may not have had actual experience of one. Perhaps, poor unquiet lady, she took them to be skulls, relics of the rude forefathers of the hamlet, a mistake natural enough for a lady long dead and probably unlearned in anatomy, and, if it were not Sunday, I would almost say permissible when I consider the descendants of the rude forefathers and the seeming texture of their heads. If that was her thought it was but becoming in her to grieve over their unburied state and to carry them over to the churchyard without the garden, there to repose decently in some hollow tomb. Truly comfort is a great stimulus to unprejudiced thought; I am able to look at a question from all sides to-day, and on further consideration I see that I am doing Lady Maud a great injustice in imputing to her ignorance of skulls. No doubt she saw plenty of them; she lived in the good old times when skeletons and even horrid corpses dabbled in gore were to be met at every turn. Horrors and yet more horrors made up the life of man; one wonders that he had the spirit even to invent bowls. In any case I think I may exonerate Lady Maud; for five centuries she has been too full of her own sorrows to

How difficult it is to get at the truth of things. This is not meant to be a wise reflection,— -one cannot be very wise on a hot afternoon in July-but in some sort to excuse myself to myself for not having made sure of Lady Maud and her legend. A little research would probably have revealed to me the whole story with names, reasons, and dates. Some relation was she to John of Gaunt, daughter possibly, or it may have been daughter-in-law; but I do not greatly care. Historical accuracy is for pale people in the British Museum, not for me on the grass with my mind full of bowls. So far as I have heard it, thus runs the tale. Back from the wars came the squire, Lady Maud's stripling son, who had gone forth to win his spurs, and it was here on this terrace walk that they first met in the dusk of a late autumn afternoon. Mother and son fell on each other's necks, and in this close embrace her jealous husband found them. A man of his age, he saw in the situation something that called for venegance first and explanation after, and springing upon the pair he seized the youth in his mighty arms and without more ado tossed him over the parapet into the river. This done, I suppose he questioned Lady Maud as to the identity of the man drowning below, or it may be that he heard his son's last cry and recognized the voice. At all events, horror-struck by what he had done he rushed from the terrace, sprang upon his horse, and rode madly out into the night. And as he rode his horse cast a shoe, which now hangs on the church door in confirmation of the tale. Should further proof be needed the sceptic has only to repair to the terrace at midnight, and if he is properly constituted he can see Lady Maud herself pacing to and fro wringing her hands.

I am not sure that I tell the legend

aright. Some say that it was Lady Maud herself who was hurled over the wall, and that her angry lord had some justification, inasmuch as the gallant was not even distantly related to her. But it does not matter which story is the true one. The important thing is that the lady still walks, and that I am told is indubitable. It is not given to everybody to see ghosts. I was recently here at midnight myself and saw nothing, though I am not altogether surprised, for it was not in the hope of seeing her that I came, and indeed if I had expected to see her I might not have come. There is a huge agile worm, known to anglers as the lobworm, who takes his walks abroad only under the stars. Him must you pursue with guile and a bedroom candlestick to light your path. On a shining night when the dew lies thick you shall see him spread at ease inches long on the smooth lawn. He has both head and tail, and, while his head wanders abroad, for safety's sake he always keeps the tip of his tail in his hole, so that when he is alarmed he can retreat backward quicker than thought can fly. It is your business to grasp him with finger and thumb before he is frightened, and very sure and rapid must you be. And you must know which end of him is head so that you may grasp the other or he will slip through your hand like an eel. Even when you have him firmly you will find that his tail clings marvellously to earth, and if you pull too hard he breaks in twain; but if you work him gently as one works a loose nail out of wood he will yield and gradually all his great length is your own. When you have him you have an excellent bait to your angle-rod, but, as I have shown, in the catching he needs to be handled with as much love and tenderness as Master Walton's frog itself. I am not ashamed of having hunted him here, but I am glad Lady Maud did not

happen upon me while I was doing so. The disembodied spirit and the maker of earth are too incongruous, and she might conceivably have resented my preference for the worm; even the ghost of a woman, I suppose, does not like being scorned.

But I could not exist within a few yards of Thames unless I had lobworms in store. For the river below is the Thames in infancy innocent as yet of locks and weirs, almost ignorant of boats, but not too young to be full of fish. Immediately under the old ivy-mantled wall Thames is a standing lesson to those who forget that they have ever been young. He is no more than six inches of crystal spread over six yards of golden gravel, and looking on him flowing thus softly I have wondered how it came about that the victim of the tragedy could possibly have been drowned. But I am told that the winter rains make a very different river of him, a foaming, swirling torrent which would bear the strongest swimmer away. Indeed a mile higher up I was shown grassy dykes in a meadow, where the river turns a sharp corner, which I wrongly took to be relics of some Roman camp. I was informed that they were nothing of the sort but merely the river's winter channel. It appears that when he is swollen and proud he disdains his banks at this point, and rushes headlong across the fields taking a short cut to his proper channel lower down. He may be very grand in winter; in fact in places he is said to be a mile wide; but I prefer him as he is now, a bright little trout stream. A trout stream, I take it, is a stream that ought to hold trout, otherwise I could not give him the honorable title, for you shall not meet with a trout in a mile of him. For all his importance in winter he is not yet old enough or wise enough to have thought out his latest and greatest triumph, the spotted monster which

has made his name famous wherever angler fastens reel to rod. What trout he has to show are small ones borrowed from his tributaries. But though he fails in that respect, in the matter of chub it would be hard to find his equal. I know of a quiet corner a few hundred yards away, where in a clear spot between the rushes and the water-lily leaves lie some halfdozen chub of astonishing magnitude. Two of these are certainly the better part of a yard long. And there they will lie for ever, I suppose, for no lure avails against them. In the deep weedy holes here and there are great pike and perch, and everywhere are roach and dace. But July is still too early for bottom fishing. It is a month for meditation in the shade until the evening, when you may put on waders and fish this delightful shallow for dace with a dry fly.

One of the few books that I carry with me on a holiday is the "Counsels Civil and Moral" of Francis Bacon. It gives me a comfortable sensation of the possession of wisdom without the trouble of acquiring it. As a matter of fact the only thing I have read in the volume since I have been here is the essay on gardens. It now lies open on the grass beside me at this passage: "The Green hath two pleasures. The one because nothing is more pleasant to the eye, than green grass kept finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge, which is to enclose the garden." Bacon had a fine feeling for grass, and I think he would have commended Lady Maud's Walk which is some thirty-five yards of green velvet separated from the river by the ancient wall and from the world by a stately hedge of yew. It is really wonderful grass, close set with scarce a base weed in it. It reminds me of the Oxford gardener and the five-pound note. VOL. LXXVII. 478.

ECLECTIC.

You

An American gentleman who was much struck with the lawns of one of the colleges drew the head-gardener aside and promised him a five-pound note if he would divulge the secret of lawn making. The gardener agreed to the bargain, took the five-pound note, and divulged the secret. "Well, sir, it's principally rolling and mowing. roll the lawn and you mow the lawn, and when it's very dry you water it of an evening. And when you've done that carefully for five hundred years you'll have a lawn something like this." I wish I knew what the American said, or did. There are two places where the wall has lost a few stones and is thus low enough for a man to lean on his elbows and look over into the river twenty feet below or across the stream to the great grass meadow opposite. There is something strange about that meadow, or plain, as from its size it deserves to be called. A man standing in it fishing in the river shall ever and anon hear sounds behind him as of men brushing hurriedly through the long dry grass, but when he looks round he shall only see the distant trees with the cows under them and perhaps a plover or two wheeling across the cloud-flecked blue. Nevertheless there are men hurrying to and fro under the noonday sun, men whose footsteps can be heard but whose feet cannot be seen. There was a great battle fought here ages ago before ever the Norman had set his seal on the land, and doubtless the slaughter was immense. But why they should still hurry across the meadow in the sunlight I know not. Perhaps the persistent foot of the angler annoys them, and they follow him as who should say

There let the wind sweep, and the plover cry,

But thou, go by.

I begin to think that this place, in spite of its beauty and ancient peace,

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