so irrevocable and yet due to so
avoidable a cause, Orpheus, in restless despair, wandered about the
lands. For him the nymphs had now no attractions, nor was there anything
in all the world but the thought of his half-regained Eurydice, now lost
for ever. His music indeed remained, nor did he cast away his lute; but
it was heard only in the most savage and lonely places. At length wild
Thracian women heard it, furious in the rites of Dionysus. They desired
him, but his heart was elsewhere, and, in the mad reaction of their
savage breasts, when he refused them they tore him limb from limb. He
was buried near the river Hebrus, and his head was thrown into the
stream. But as the waters bore it down, the lips whose singing had
charmed the world still repeated the beloved name Eurydice to the waters
as they flowed.

Here again it is as if, searching for the dead in some ancient
sepulchre, we had found a living man and friend. The symbolism of the
story, disentangled from detail which may have been true enough in a
lesser way, is clear to every reader. It tells that love is strong as
death--that old sweet assurance which the lover in Canticles also
discovered. Love is indeed set here under conditions, or rather it has
perceived the conditions which the order of things has set, and these
conditions have been violated. But still the voice of the severed head,
crying out the beloved name as the waters bore it to the sea, speaks in
its own exquisite way the final word. It gives the same assurance with
the same thrill which we feel when we read the story of Herakles
wrestling with death for the body of Alkestis, and winning the woman
back from her very tomb.

But before love can be a match for death, it first must conquer life,
and the early story of the power of Orpheus over the wild beasts,
restoring, as it does, an earthly paradise in which there is nothing but
gentleness, marks the conquest of life by love. All life's wildness and
savagery, which seem to give the lie to love continually, are after all
conquerable and may be tamed. And the lesson of it all is the great
persuasion that in the depth of things life is good and not evil. When
we come to the second conflict, and that love which has mastered life
now pits itself against death, it goes forward to the greater adventure
with a strange confidence. Who that has looked upon the face of one
dearly beloved who is dead, has not known the leap of the spirit, not so
much in