_Another._ O miserable woman! O abhorred! _Voice of a Child within._ What shall I do? What is it? Keep me fast From Mother! _The Other Child._ I know nothing. Brother! Oh, I think she means to kill us. _One of the Chorus._ Let me go! I will!--Help, help! And save them at the last! _Child._ Yes, in God's name. Help quickly or we die! _The Other Child._ She has almost caught me now: she has a sword. One sees the Women of the Chorus listening for the Children's words; then they break, as it were, from the spell of their own super-mortal atmosphere, and fling themselves on the barred door. They beat in vain against the bars and the Children's voices cry for help from the other side. But the inrush of violent horror is only tolerated for a moment. Even in the next words we are moving back to the realm of formal poetry: _Women Beating at the Door._ Thou stone, thou thing of iron! Wilt verily Spill with thine hand that life, the vintage stored Of thine own agony? _Others_ A woman slew her babes in days of yore, One, only one, from dawn to eventide. . . . and in a moment we are away in a beautiful remote song about far-off children who have been slain in legend. That death-cry is no longer a shriek heard in the next room. It is the echo of many cries of children from the beginning of the world, children who are now at peace and whose ancient pain has become part mystery and part music. Memory--that Memory who was mother of the Muses--has done her work upon it. We see here the justification of the high formalism and convention of Greek tragedy. It can touch without flinching any horror of tragic life, without failing in sincerity and without marring its normal atmosphere of beauty. It brings things under the great magic of something which is hard to name, but which I have tried in these pages to indicate; something that we can think of as eternity or the universal or perhaps even as Memory. For Memory, used in this way, has a magical power. As Mr. Bertrand Russell has finely put it in one of his _Essays_, "The Past does not change or strive. Like Duncan in _Macbeth_ 'After life's fitful fever it sleeps well.' What was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away. The things that were beautiful and eternal shine out like stars in the night."