ide of faces on the tiers--which rose through the golden
dusk, and vanished at last in a darkness that still seemed to be a
little softened by the faint suggestion of a golden haze.

Interest and light thus together were focused upon the climax of the
tragedy. Leaving the light, and with it love and hope and life, behind
him, _Oedipus_ descended the steps of the palace, leaning upon the
shoulder of a slave, and moved toward the thickening shadows. Watching
after him with a profoundly sorrowful intensity was the group upon the
stage: a gorgeous mass of warm colour, broken by dashes of gleaming
white and bathed in a golden glow. Slowly, painfully, along that rough
and troublous way, into an ever-deepening obscurity merging into
darkness irrevocable, the blinded king went onward toward the outer
wilderness where would be spent the dreary remnant of his broken days.
Feeling his way through the tangled bushes; stumbling, almost falling,
over the blocks of stone; at times halting, and in his desperate sorrow
raising his hands imploringly toward the gods whose foreordered curse
had fallen upon him because of his foreordered sin, he went on and on:
while upon the great auditorium there rested an ardent silence which
seemed even to still the beatings of the eight thousand hearts. And
when, passing into the black depths of the broken archway, the last
faint gleam of his white drapery vanished, and the strain relaxed which
had held the audience still and silent, there came first from all those
eager breasts--before the roar of applause which rose and fell, and
rose again, and seemed for a while to be quite inextinguishable--a
deep-drawn sigh.

X

"Antigone," played on the second evening--being a gentler tragedy than
"Oedipus," and conceived in a spirit more in touch with our modern
times--was received with a warmer enthusiasm. No doubt to the Greeks, to
whom its religious motive was a living reality, "Oedipus" was purely
awe-inspiring; but to us, for whom the religious element practically has
no existence, the intrinsic qualities of the plot are so repellent that
the play is less awe-inspiring than horrible. And even in Grecian times,
I fancy--human nature being the same then as now in its
substrata--"Antigone," with its conflict between mortals, must have
appealed more searchingly to human hearts than ever "Oedipus" could have
appealed with its conflict between a mortal and the gods. Naturally, we
are in closer sympathy with