Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/88

lxxxvi Strange, unconscious prophecy, that, of the words, "a ransom for many," spoken by the Holiest!

It would be to give an undue prominence to a few scattered passages which are hardly more than a recognition of popular belief, to represent Sophocles as having been a preacher of immortality, even in the degree in which that title may be claimed for Socrates. The clouds that hung over the future were thick and dark, and it was not given to him to look behind the veil. But so far as the tendencies of his mind are traceable, there seem good grounds for classing him with those who sought to carry men's thoughts forward into the future in the spirit of reverence and hope, with Pythagoras, and Zamolxis, and Herodotos, and Plato, rather than with the scoffers, to whom this life was all, and by whom, therefore, it was sensualised and degraded. With the wonderful intuition of a noble soul, he fixes on all elements of popular belief that pointed upwards. The blessedness of the death of Œdipus carries our thoughts on irresistibly to something beyond itself, to a rest of which it was but the prelude and the foretaste. Even the suicide of Aias is not shrouded in darkness and despair. He is