by the advice of Ulysses, he was landed while asleep on the desert isle of Lemnos, and there left alone in his misery.
It is at Lemnos, accordingly, that the scene of this tragedy is laid. Instead of the usual palace or ancestral mansion in the background—with the city on one side and the open country on the other—the spectators have nothing before them but rocks and waves; and these for nine weary years had been the sole companions of Philoctetes.[1] From time to time some stray ship had come, and the sailors had so far pitied him as to give him some scanty supplies of food and clothing; but none would listen to his prayers that they would carry him home with them to Greece. And so he had lingered on, tortured by his rankling wound,—satisfying his hunger with the birds that he brought down with his bow, and with difficulty dragging his limbs to the spring to quench his thirst.
Meanwhile Troy was still being besieged, though many of the great heroes of the war had met their
- ↑ We may compare a similar passage in Tennyson's Enoch Arden, p. 32,—
"The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glade high up like ways to heaven,
The glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever heard a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwrecked sailor, waiting for a sail."
