Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/106

 cii INTRODUCTION ���wits are keen, his nerves steady, his personal resource unfailing. Just, generous, forgiving, with high spirit and passionate emotions, he yet is but an aggregation of virtues, not a man. �There are more reminisences of the heroic tragedy in this play than in Love and Innocence. The prison-scene between Aristor and Amalintha is not without some likeness to the wit-combats popular in Dryden's day. The long death-scene when Aristor, mortally wounded in the battle, conceals his wound from Amalintha, and Amalintha, likewise mortally wounded, conceals her wound from Aristor, until they die almost simultaneously, the promptness with which the nurse expires on seeing their dead bodies, the unanimity with which the others prepare to fall on their swords, carry us into just the air of extravagant unreality found in many of the tragic closing scenes of the heroic drama. On the stage Arisiomenes would offer bustle and variety, with its clamor and hurry of war, its pastoral love-making, its assem- blies of state, its prison-scenes, and its underground caves with spectral musicians; but it would hardly hold interest either by the plot or the characters. �Wordsworth commented on the lines: �Love's soft bands, �His gentle cords of Hyacinths and Roses, Wove in the dewy spring whem storms are silent, �as a characteristic passage, but more characteristic and quite as charming are the pathetic words of Amalintha: �But are there none, none that do Live and Love. x �That early meet, and in the Spring of Youth, �Uncrossed, nor troubled in the soft design, �Set sweetly out, and travel on to age, �In mutual joys, that with themselves expire. �Of great beauty is the lament of Aristomenes for his son Aristor : ��� �