Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/30

 "But all the people lifted up a voice of anguish and of awe, since one was frenzied and the other slain; and no one dared to come before the man. For he was twitched to the ground and into the air, howling, shrieking; and the rocks rang around,—the steep Locrian headlands and Eubœa's capes. But when he was worn out with ofttimes throwing himself in his misery on the ground and often making loud lament, while he reviled his ill-starred wedlock with thee and his marriage into the house of Œneus, saying how he had found in it the ruin of his life—then, out of the flame and smoke that beset him, he lifted his distorted eye and saw me in the great host, weeping; and he looked at me, and called me, 'Son, come here, do not flee my woe, even if thou must die with me—come, bear me out of the crowd, and set me, if thou canst, in a place where no man shall see me; or, if thou hast any pity, at least convey me with all speed out of this land, and let me not die on this spot.'"

Presently Heracles himself is brought before the eyes of the spectators. In the lamentation wrung from him by his torment two strains are clear above the rest, and each is a strain of thoroughly human anguish. He contrasts the strength in which, through life, he has been the champion of helpless men—"ofttimes on the sea and in all forests ridding them of plagues"—with his own helpless misery in this hour; and he contrasts the greatness of the work to which he had seemed called with the weakness of the agent who has arrested it:—