ice cried 'Sleep no
more!' he is more Aeschylean in spirit. That dreadful voice
rings through Aeschylus; who was altogether obsessed with the
majesty and awfulness of Karma. It is what he cried to Athens
then, and to all ages since, reiterating _Karma_ with terrible
sleep-forbidding insistency from dark heights.--I have quoted the
wonderful line in which Browning, using similes borrowed from
Aeschylus himself, sums up the effect of his style:

'Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,'

which compensates for the more than Greek--unintelligibility of
Browning's version of the _Agamemnon:_ it gives you some color,
some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we
compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain
of Song? Shakespeare--as I think--throned upon a peak where are
storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all
this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind: Dante--a
prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride
of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,--only to
correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within
that he knew better;--this Universe for him but the crust and
excoriata of the Universe of the Soul. Milton--a Titan Soul
hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep
to enunciate--just to proclaim and put on everlasting record--
those two profound significant words, _Titan_ and _Soul,_ for a
memorial to Man of the real nature of Man. Aeschylus--the
barking of an eagle--of Zeus the Thunderer's own eagle out of
ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma,
mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph
of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly
impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh,
perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand;
immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;--
ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark
tremendous destinies;--and yet he too with serenity and the
Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us: he will not
leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they
are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.

Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves
on the minds of those who know him. They bear testimony to the
fact that, however grand his style--like a Milton Carlylized in
poet