ebes by his subjects and his sons,
wanders forth, abject and forlorn, he is supported by his daughter
Antigone; who leads him from city to city, begs for him, and pleads for
him against the harsh, rude men, who, struck more by his guilt than his
misery, would drive him from his last asylum. In the opening of the
"Oedipus Coloneus," where the wretched old man appears leaning on his
child, and seats himself in the consecrated Grove of the Furies, the
picture presented to us is wonderfully solemn and beautiful. The
patient, duteous tenderness of Antigone; the scene in which she pleads
for her brother Polynices, and supplicates her father to receive his
offending son; her remonstrance to Polynices, when she entreats him not
to carry the threatened war into his native country, are finely and
powerfully delineated; and in her lamentation over Oedipus, when he
perishes in the mysterious grove, there is a pathetic beauty, apparent
even through the stiffness of the translation.

Alas! I only wished I might have died
With my poor father; wherefore should I ask
For longer life?
O I was fond of misery with him;
E'en what was most unlovely grew beloved
When he was with me. O my dearest father,
Beneath the earth now in deep darkness hid,
Worn as thou wert with age, to me thou still
Wert dear, and shalt be ever.
--Even as he wished he died,
In a strange land--for such was his desire--
A shady turf covered his lifeless limbs,
Nor unlamented fell! for O these eyes,
My father, still shall weep for thee, nor time
E'er blot thee from my memory.

The filial piety of Antigone is the most affecting part of the tragedy
of "Oedipus Coloneus:" her sisterly affection, and her heroic
self-devotion to a religious duty, form the plot of the tragedy called
by her name. When her two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, had slain
each other before the walls of Thebes, Creon issued an edict forbidding
the rites of sepulture to Polynices, (as the invader of his country,)
and awarding instant death to those who should dare to bury him. We know
the importance which the ancients attached to the funeral obsequies, as
alone securing their admission into the Elysian fields. Antigone, upon
hearing the law of Creon, which thus carried vengeance beyond the grave,
enters in the first scene, announcing her fixed resolution to brave the
threatened punishment: her sister Ismene shrinks from sharing the pe