Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/42

 poems a colour and a pathos, a gentle glory and a luminous tenderness, which only such a framework of time and place could give. Out of the strong has come forth such sweetness, out of the lion's mouth such honey, as no smaller or weaker thing can breed. Assuredly, as the Master has said himself in that majestic prose poem inscribed with the name of Shakespeare, the mightiest mountains can outmatch even for flowers the valleys whose whole business is to rear them; their blossoming ravines and hollows full of April can beat the meadows at their own trade; the strongest of singers are the sweetest, and no poet of the idyllic or elegiac kind can rival even on his own peculiar ground, for tender grace and delicacy of beauty, the most potent poets of a higher order, sovereigns of lyric and of tragic song. It is Æschylus, and not Euripides, who fills the bitter air of the Scythian ravine with music of wings and words more sweet than sleep to the weary, with notes of heavenly pity and love unsubduable by fear; who shows us with one touch of terrible tenderness the maiden agony of Iphigenia, smiting with the piteous dart of her eye each one of the ministers of sacrifice, in dumb show as of a picture striving to speak to them; who throws upon the most fearful scene in all tragedy a flash of pathos unspeakable, when Clytæmnestra bares before the sword of her son the bosom that suckled him as he slept. What Euripidean overflow of tears and words can be matched for its own special and much vaunted quality of tender and pathetic sweetness against such instances as these of the awful sweetness and intensity of the pathos of Æschylus? what wailing outcry "in the measures of