We fancy we trace the history of the cause of the fall of man, in the eating of the pomegranate seed which doomed Proserpine to half an existence in the infernal regions. Can there be anything more striking than the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus? Whence could such a notion come, that a man-god would, for his love to mankind, (for bringing down fire from heaven,) suffer agonies, nailed not upon a cross indeed, but on a rock, and, in the description, crucified? "It is, after a manner," says Mr Swayne, who has with great power translated this strange play of Æschylus, "a Christian poem by a pagan author, foreshadowing the opposition and reconciliation of Divine justice and Divine love. Whence the sublime conception of the subject of this drama could have been obtained, it is useless to speculate. Some even suppose that its author must have been acquainted with the old Hebrew prophets." Even the introduction of Io in the tale is suggestive--the virgin-mother who was so strangely to conceive (and this too given in a prophecy) miraculously. "Jove at length shall give thee back thy mind, With one light touch of his unquailing hand, And, from that fertilising touch, a son Shall call thee mother." Her whom Prometheus thus addresses,-- "In that the son shall overmatch the sire." --"Of thine own stem the strong one shall be born." Then again Sampson passes into the Egyptian or Tyrian Hercules, to lose his life by another Delilah in Dejaneira. Whence the prophetic Sybils, whence and what the Eleusinian mysteries? and that strange glimpse of them in the significant passage of the Alcestis, where the restored from the dead must abstain from speech till the third day--the duration of her consecration to Hades! Ὁύπω δέμις σοι τησδε προσφωνηματων, Κλύειν, πρίν ἄν θεωισι τοῖσι νερτέροις Αφαγνῖσηται, καὶτρίτον μολῃ φαος.