gregated to watch the fortunes of the tragedy on its opening night; and Mr. Leigh Hunt has pictured the dazzling coup d'œil of the theatre, where, "ever and aye, hands, stung with tear-thrilled eyes, snapping the silence,[1] burst in crashing thunders"—and where the proud, glad-hearted dramatist might, amid thick-clustered intellectual bevies,
see his high compeers,
Wordsworth and Landor—see the piled array,
The many-visaged heart, looking one way,
Come to drink beauteous truth at eyes and ears.
Of "Ion" we may say, as its author has said of the "Ion" of Euripides, that the simplicity and reverence inherent in the mind of its hero are no less distinct and lovely than the picture of the scenery with which he is surrounded. His feelings of humble gratitude to the power which has protected him—his virtue unspotted from the world—and his cleaving to the sacred seclusion which has enwrapped him from childhood, are beautifully drawn. The picture seems sky-tinctured, of an ethereal purity of colouring.[2] Ion's
life hath flowed
From its mysterious urn a sacred stream,
In whose calm depth the beautiful and pure
Alone are mirror'd.
Love is the germ of his mild nature, and hitherto the love of others hath made his life one cloudless holiday. But a curse smites the city—pestilence stalks there by noonday, and its arrows fly by night, and there is not a house in which there's not one dead—
᾿εν δ᾽ δ πυρφορος θεος
Σκηψας ἐλαυνει, λοιμος ἐχθιστος, πολιν.[3]
And with this crisis in the history of Argos opens a crisis in the nature of Ion—his soul responding mysteriously to the public affliction, and conscious of strange connexion with it: his bearing becomes altered; his smile, gracious as ever, wears unwonted sorrow in its sweetness; "his form appears dilated; in those eyes where pleasure danced, a thoughtful sadness dwells; stem purpose knits the forehead, which till now knew not the passing wrinkle of a care." All this is touchingly and tenderly brought out; and indeed the whole tragedy is touching and tender. Beautiful passages, feelingly thoughtful, and in a dulcet strain of rhythmical expression, enrich its scenes. But that it has massive power, as some allege, or that it is an outburst of ardent genius, or that it is true, first and last, to the spirit of the ancient Greek drama, and is indeed the one solitary and peerless specimen in modern times of that wondrous composition—when we hear this sort of thing dogmatically reiterated, we are stolidly infidel. The very atmosphere of Attica, is it?—we cannot "swallow" it, then. Byron tells us how John Keats
without Greek
Contrived to talk about the gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
The author of "Ion," with Greek, has made his Argives talk as the real "old folks" may be supposed not to have talked. Medon and Agenor,
