ind no satisfaction for its deeper needs in such conceptions; urged on
by its secret instincts, it sought to recompose the broken unity of the
divine nature.

All government requires a Head; and when an attempt was made to apply
the heterogeneous qualities and contradictory powers of the gods to the
regulation of society--when it was necessary to find in an Olympus
filled with quarrels and scandals, a steady Power capable of directing
the destinies of a great people toward a single aim--men were again
forced to recompose the fractioned Unity, to form an idea of one God
superior to those with whom they had peopled earth and heaven. They
were thus forced upon the conception of a Being superior to Jupiter, who
subjected all the gods to his inflexible laws; and giving wings to those
instincts of dread always present in the soul of a fallen race, they
invented an invisible Divinity who never manifested himself to men; who
dwelt in inaccessible and dreadful regions, in which an inscrutable
Horror forever reigned; and through this new Terror, Unity was again
brought into the design of creation, for all beings were, in despite of
themselves, forced to fulfil the decrees of its pitiless will. All
struggle was vain, all effort useless, prayer was without avail, and
human anguish utterly unheeded by this terrific phantom of irresistible
and crushing Power without a heart!

It is this dread idea which, pervading the pages of Eschylus, gives them
that peculiar character of simplicity and grandeur, with which no other
tragedies are marked in a like degree. Such was the source of the
inspiration of classic tragedy, the spring of that stern and severe
poetry which throws the lurid hues of a melancholy so profound upon the
pallid and affrighted face of humanity. Man, struggling with all the
gloomy energy of despair against this vague but formidable Horror, which
no virtue or agony could conciliate--this dark Fate, the creation of his
own misled and perverted intuitions--and vainly seeking to escape from
the inflexible circle which he had traced around himself, is an object
which cannot fail to awaken the deepest pity. He asks from his fellow
men, from nature, from the gods, the meaning of the dire enigma of life.
Alas! they leave him to struggle in the stony hands of an unbending
Fate! no reply is ever given to his wild demand, and the 'veil of Isis
is never raised!' The world quivered under some strange anathema; a
mystic malediction