the mystic symbolism
of the dramatic Choruses, taken out of its religious connections,
becomes an insoluble enigma; and naturally enough; for its first use
was in religious worship,--though afterwards it became associated with
traditionary and historic events. Besides, it was supposed that the
tragedians wrote under a divine inspiration; and the subjects and
representations which they embodied were for the most part susceptible
of a deep spiritual interpretation. Indeed, upon a careful examination,
we shall find that very many of the dramas directly suggest the two
Eleusinian movements, representing first the flight of suppliants--as
of the Heraclidae, the daughters of Danaues, and of Oedipus and
Antigone--from persecution to the shrine of some Saviour Deity,--and
finally a deliverance effected through sacrifice or divine
interposition. Examples of this are so numerous that we have no space
for a minute consideration.

But certainly it is plain that the Eleusinia, as being more central,
more purely spiritual, must in the thought of Greece have risen high
above the drama. The very dress in which the _mystae_ were initiated was
preserved as most sacred or deposited in the temple. Or if we insist
upon measuring their appreciation of the Festival by the more palpable
standard of numbers,--the temple at Eleusis, by the account of Strabo,
was capable of holding even in its mystic cell more persons than the
theatre. To be sure, the celebration was only once in five years,--but
it was all the more sacred from this very infrequency. Nothing in all
Greece--and that is saying very much--could compare with it in its depth
of divine mystery. If anything could, it would have been the drama; but
no wailings were ever heard from beneath the masks of the stage like the
wailings of Achtheia,--no jubilant song of the Chorus ever rose like the
paean of Dionysiac triumph.

* * * * *

Thus was the name of Dionysus connected with the palace and the temple,
with the sepulchral court of death and the dramatic representations of
life,--and everywhere associated with our Lady.

Sometimes, indeed, she seems to overshadow and hide him from our vision.
Thus was it when the Eumenides in their final triumph swept the stage,
and victory seemed all in the hands of invisible Powers, with no
human participant: even as throughout the Homeric epos there runs an
undercurrent of unutterable sadness; because, while to the Go