At other times the effect is reached by emphasizing just the other side, the unearthliness of the Chorus. In the _Heracles_, for instance, when the tyrant Lycus is about to make some suppliants leave the protection of an altar by burning them--a kind of atrocity which just avoided the technical religious offence of violating sanctuary--the Chorus of old men tries for a moment to raise its hand against the tyrant's soldiers. It is like the figures of a dream trying to fight--"words and a hidden-featured thing seen in a dream of the night," as the poet himself says, trying to battle against flesh and blood; a helpless visionary transient struggle which is beautiful for a moment but would be grotesque if it lasted. Again, in the lost _Antiope_ there is a scene where the tyrant is inveigled into a hut by murderers; he manages to dash out and appeals to the Chorus of old men for help. But they are not really old men; they are only ancient echoes or voices of Justice, who speak his doom upon him, standing moveless while the slayers come. These examples enable us to understand a still stronger effect of the same kind which occurs in the _Medea_ and has, until very lately, been utterly condemned and misunderstood. It is an effect rather reminding one of the Greek fable of a human wrong so terrible that it shook the very Sun out of his course. It is like the human cry in the _Electra_ (p. 157), which shook the eternal peace of the gods in heaven. There is something delirious about it, an impossible invasion of the higher world by the lower, a shattering of unapproachable bars. Medea has gone to murder her children inside the house. The Chorus is left chanting its own, and our, anguish outside. "Why do they not rush in and save the children?" asked the critics. In the first place, because that is not the kind of action that a Chorus can ever perform. That needs flesh and blood. "Well," the critic continues, "if they cannot act effectively, why does Euripides put them in a position in which we instinctively clamour for effective action and they are absurd if they do not act?" The answer to that is given in the play itself. They do not rush in; there is no question of their rushing in: because the door is barred. When Jason in the next scene tries to enter the house he has to use soldiers with crowbars. The only action they can possibly perform is the sort that specially belongs to the Chorus, the action of baffled desire. Medea is in the house; the Chorus is chanting its sublimated impersonal emotion about the Love that has turned to Hate in Medea, and its dread of things to come (1267 ff.): For fierce are the smitings back of blood once shed Where Love hath been: God's wrath upon them that kill, And an anguished Earth, and the wonder of the dead Haunting as music still. . . . when a sudden cry is heard within. The song breaks short, and one woman speaks: Hark! Did ye hear? Heard ye the children's cry?