Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/93

Rh emotions are themselves purified and ennobled, and freed from contact with what is base and unmanly. With the power of word-painting, which shows itself in descriptions like that of the plague at Thebes, Teiresias' seat of augury,  the cave of Philoctetes,  the grove of the Eumenides,  the stories of the Guard in the Antigone,  he is yet careful to guard himself against overstepping the boundaries which his keen perception of proportion led him from the first to trace; and we never feel that the accessories have usurped the place which ought to be occupied only by the more essential elements of the drama In the Œdipus at Colonos, (1148,) he deliberately sacrifices an opportunity for a long narrative of a battle such as Euripides would have delighted in, in order to bring out, in a few simple words, the nobleness of Theseus. Great as is the lyric power shown in the choral odes which, like those in "Œdipus the King," approach more closely than others to the character of hymns or litanies, they are yet, in all cases, connected essentially with the action of the drama, and are always more than "purple patches" of beauty interpolated as ornaments to win the applause of the audience. Here and there, even, broad as was the line of demarcation in ancient art between the provinces of Tragedy and