Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/28

 murderer: and thenceforward, through indignation, scorn, agonized suspense, the human passion mounts until it bursts forth in the last storm.

And now the human element of the history has been worked out. Œdipus has passed to the limit of earthly anguish; and, as if with his self-inflicted blindness had come clearer spiritual sight, he begins to feel a presentiment of some further, peculiar doom. "Suffer me to dwell on the hills," he asks of Creon, "that there I may die. And yet thus much I know, that neither sickness nor aught else shall destroy me; for I should never have been saved on the verge of death except for some strange ill." The second play of Sophocles—"Œdipus at Colonus"—has pervading it the calm of an assurance into which this first troubled foreboding has settled down: Œdipus, already in spirit separate from men, has found at Colonus the destined haven of his wanderings, and only awaits the summons out of life. At last from the darkness of the sacred cavern the voice long-waited for is heard,—"Œdipus, Œdipus, why do we tarry?" And the eye-witness of his passing says, "Not the fiery bolt of the god took him away, nor the tumult of sea-storm in that hour, but either a summoner from heaven, or the deep place of the dead opened to him in love, without a pang. For the man was ushered forth, not with groans nor in sickness or pain, but beyond all mortals, wondrously."

As Œdipus, first shown in the vividness of a tortured humanity, is then raised above men by