THE EPIC OF HADES.* IN the parts now published, the

author of Songs of Two Worlds adds to that Epic of Hades which we noticed last year, two fresh parts, one depicting the pains of Tartarus, and one the perfect life of Olympus, between which the poem published last year will take its place as the picture of the middle state of the great world of spirits. The writer's leading idea, however, does not admit of any parallel conception to Dante's Inferno, Purga- torio, and Paradiso, for the chief object of the present author is to represent Tartarus and Hades as both of them purgatorial regions, in which pain cleanses from the stain of evil, though the process in relation to the deeper stains of sin is of age-long duration. Thus Tantalus himself is made to say :—

" Ah ! fool, to dream That the long stain of time might fade and merge

In one poor chrism of blood. They taught of yore, My priests who flattered me—nor knew at all The greater God I know, who sits afar Beyond those earthly shapes, passionless, pure, And awful as the Dawn—that the gods cared For costly victims, drinking in the steam Of sacrifice when the choice hecatombs Were offered for my wrong. Ah no ! there is No recompense in these, nor any charm To cleanse the stain of sin, but the long wear Of suffering, when the soul which seized too much Of pleasure here, grows righteous by the pain Which doth redress its wrong. For what is Right But equipoise of Nature, alternating The Too Much by Too Little ? Not on earth The salutary silent forces work Their final victory, but year on year Passes, and age on age, and leaves the debt Unsatisfied, while the o'erburdened soul Unloads itself in pain. Therefore it is I suffer as I suffered ere swift death Set use not free, no otherwise ; and yet There comes a healing purpose in my pain I never knew on earth ; nor ever here The once-loved evil grows, only the tale Of penalties grown greater hourly dwarfs The accomplished sum of wrong. And yet desire Pursues me still,—sick, impotent desire, Fiercer than that of earth."

Tartarus, therefore, is only the state in which the darkness is far greater than the light, Hades that in which the light begins to overpower the gloom, and Olympus that in which the celestial light is undimmed, though its forms are still finite. The treat- ment is full of skill and charm, though the optimism of the author's idea, makes his Tartarus lose something in sublimity to compensate what it gains in tenderness. The true horror of moral evil,—that it loses the very desire to be extinguished, and feels that there is no release for it simply because release would mean, to its corrupt mind, a release from the only end it really yearns after, is hardly depicted here at all, except perhaps in a single fine passage in the poem on Clytemnestra, in which she describes as follows the vengeance which her son Orestes took upon her for his father's murder :— " Until one day I, looking from my palace casement, saw A humble suppliant, clad in pilgrim garb, Approach the marble stair. A sudden throb Thrilled thro' me, and the mother's heart went forth Thro' all disguise of garb and rank and years, • Boots I. and III, of the Epic of Hades.-1. 7'artarat and the Olympus. Completing the Work. By the Author of "Songs of Two Worlds." London : Henry S. King and Co.

Knowing my son. How fair he was, hew tall And vigorous, my boy ! What fair straight limbs And noble port! How beautiful the shade Of manhood on his lip! I longed to burst From my chamber down, yearning to throw myself Upon his neck within the palace court, Before the guards—spurning my queenly rank, All but my motherhood. And then a chill Of doubt o'erepread me, knowing what a gulf Fate set between our lives, impassable As that great gulf which yawns 'twist life and death And 'twat this Hell and Heaven. I shrank back, And turned to think a moment, half in fear, And half in pain ; dividing the swift mind. Yet all in love. Then came a cry, a groan From the inner court, the clash of swords, the fall Of a body on the pavement; and one cried, 'The King is dead, slain by the young Orestes, Who cometh hither.' With the word, the door Flew open, and my son stood straight before me, His drawn sword dripping blood. Oh, he was fair And terrible to see, when from his limbs The suppliant's mantle fallen, left the mail And arms of a young warrior. Love and Hate, Which are the offspring of a common sire, Strove for the mastery, till within his eyes I saw his father's ghost glare unappeased From out Love's casements.

Then I knew my fate And his—mine to be slain by my son's hand, And his to slay me, since the Furies drays' .

Our lives to one destruction; and I took His point within my breast. But I praise not

The selfish,-eareless gods who wrecked our lives,

Making the King the murderer of his girl, And me his murderess; making my son

The murderer of his mother and her love—

A mystery of blood I—I curse them all, The careless Forces, sitting far withdrawn Upon the heights of Space, taking men's lives For playthings, and deriding as in sport Our happiness and woe—I curse them all.

We have a right to joy; we have a right, I say, as they have. Let them stand confessed The puppets that they are—too weak to give The good they feign to love, since Fate, too strong For them as us, beyond their painted sky, Sits and derides them too. I curse Fate too, The deaf blind fury, taking human souls And crushing them, as a dull fretful child Crushes its toys and knows not with what skill Those feeble forms are feigned.

I curse, I loathe, I spit on them. It doth repent me not.

I would 'twere yet to do. I have lived my life.

I have loved. See, there he lies within the bath, And thus I smite him ! thus Didst hear him groan ?

Oh, vengeance, thou art sweet! What, living still ?

Ah me ! we cannot die ! Come, torture me,

Ye Furies—for I love not soothing words—

As once ye did my son. Ye miserable Blind ministers of Hell, I do defy you ; Not all your torments can undo the Past Of Passion and of Love !' Even as she opera There came a viewless trouble in the air, Which took her, and a sweep of wings unseen, And terrible sounds, which swooped on her and hushed Her voice, and seemed to occupy her soul With horror and despair ; and as she passed I marked her agonised eyes."

That is a fine picture of the true Tartarus,—the true hell, which is so much a law unto itself that it resists the very offer of re- demption as if it were an outrage. And it is, perhaps, a fault in so completely new a recast of Greek fable that the poet, whose purpose it evidently is to shade off Tartarus into Hades and Hades into the finite glories of Olympus, and then to connect the limited perfections of the gods —the human ideals—with the infinite source of all perfection— does not even attempt to deal with this most difficult of all the links in the ascending scale,—the link which connects the glory in evil, the love of evil, with that turning-away of the heart from it which is the first condition of any upward growth. The true mystery of evil appears to be in the rapidly diminishing power to live, or even desire to live, without it,—the contraction of the life and heart to limits within which good is impossible. The Greeks appear to have perceived this vividly. And our poet, in the attempt to spiritualise their unseen world, should have at least at- tempted to deal with this critical feature in their moral conception of it. We note it, too, as to some extent a departure from the author's method, as illustrated in the other parts of his poem, that in his " Tartarus " he appears to go deeper into the gloom in passing from Tantalus, and Pbredra, and Sisyphus, with their gleams of penitence and aspiration, to Clytemnestra, with her deadly rage against the gods, and her firm resolve never to repent her sin,

though both in his "Hades" and his " Olympus " he carries us steadily upwards towards the light.

We confess that we felt some fear lest in the more difficult attempt to spiritualise Olympus our author should spoil a poem which, in its other parts, is so full of beauty. But our fear was needless. Perhaps in the studies of Artemis and Aphrodite there is some justification for it. There is certainly less of character- istic beauty in these two pictures than in any other parts of his work. But in the treatment of Athene, Here, Apollo, and Zeus, he more than makes up for his temporary falling-off. Indeed, there is something of higher power than anything he has else- where given UB in the picture of Zeus as the infinite and invisible author and fountain of all the more finite virtues :—

" Then when my life.revived again, I said

Whispering, 'But Zeus I saw not, the prime Source And Sire of all the gods.' And she bent low With downcast eyes. Nay. Thou bast seen of Him All that thine eyes can bear, in those fair forms Which are but parts of Him, and are indeed Attributes of the Substance which supports The Universe of Things—the Soul of the World, The Stream which flows Eternal, from no Source Into no Sea. His Purity, His Strength, His Love, His Knowledge, His unchanging rule Of Duty, thou hast seen, only a part And not the whole, being a finite mind Teciweak for infinite thought; nor, couldst thou see All of Him visible to mortal sight,

Wouldat thou see all His essence, since the gods—

Glorified essences of Human mould,

Who are but Zeus made visible to men—

See Him not wholly, only some thin edge And halo of His glory; nor know they What vast and unsuspected Universes Lie beyond thought, where yet He rules, like those Vast Suns we cannot see, round whieh our Sun Moves with his system, or those darker still Which not even thus we know, but yet exist Tho' no eye marks, nor thought itself, and lurk In the awful Depths of Space; or that which is Not orbed as yet, but indiscrete, confused, Sown thro' the void—the faintest gleam of light Which sets itself to Be. And yet is He There too, and rules, none seeing. But sometimes To this our heaven, which is so like to earth But nearer to Him, for awhile He shows Some gleam of His own brightness, and methinks It cometh soon ; but thou, if thou shouldst gaze, Thy Life will rush to His —the tiny spark Absorbed in that full blaze—and what there is Of mortal fall from thee.' But I: Oh soul, What holdeth Life more precious than to know The Giver and to die ?'

Then she : 'Behold!

Look upward and adore.' And with the word,

Unhasting, undelaying, gradual, sure'

The floating cloud which clothed the hidden peak Rose slow in awful silence, laying bare Spire after rocky spire snow after snow, Whiter and yet more dreadful, till at bat It left the summit clear.

Then with a bound,

In the twinkling of an eye, in the flash of a thought, I knew an Awful Effluence of Light, Formless, Ineffable, Perfect, burst on me And flood my being round, and take my life Into itself. I saw my guide bent down Prostrate, her wings before her face; and then No more."

That is very fine, and reminds tts of a passage in Dr. Newman's Dream of Gerontius, from which, we suspect, our poet must have snatched at least a suggestion of this noble climax to his poem.

On the whole, we believe that this spiritualised study of the Greek unseen world will live as a poem of permanent power and charm, though some portions of the Greek myths have certainly foiled our author by their unmanageable earthliness, while to other portions, again, especially those which image the mystery of evil, he has hardly given their full depth. But when the poem is read as a whole, with the part first published relegated to its right place between those which have just appeared, it will, we think, receive high appreciation from all—not a very few, in any generation—who can enter into its meaning, for its graphic and liquid pictures of external beauty, the depth and truth of its purgatorial ideas, and the ardour, tenderness, and exaltation of its spiritual life.