And this quiet opening is especially used to produce the right state of mind in the audience--or, as our modern phrase puts it, to give the play its atmosphere. Take almost any opening: the _Suppliant Women_, with its band of desolate mothers kneeling at an altar and holding the Queen prisoner while she speaks: the _Andromache_, the _Heracles_, the _Children of Heracles_ almost the same--an altar and helpless people kneeling at it--kneeling and waiting: the _Trojan Women_ with its dim-seen angry gods; the _Hecuba_ with its ruined city walls and desolate plain and the ghost of the murdered Polydorus brooding over them; the _Hippolytus_ with its sinister goddess, potent and inexorable, who vanishes at the note of the hunting horn but is felt in the background throughout the whole play; the _Iphigenîa_, with its solitary and exiled priestess waiting at the doors of her strange temple of death. Most of the prologues have about them something supernatural; all of them something mysterious; and all of them are scenes of waiting, not acting--waiting till the atmosphere can slowly gain its full hold. Regarded from this point of view I think that every opening scene in Greek tragedy will be seen to have its significance and its value in the whole scheme of the play. Certainly the prologue generally justifies itself in the acting. * * * * * And when the prologue is over and the action begins, we need not expect even then any rapid stir or bustle. Dr. Johnson has told us that a man who should read Richardson for the story might as well hang himself; the same fate might overtake one who sate at Greek tragedies expecting them to hurry at his bidding. The swift rush will come, sure enough, swift and wild with almost intolerable passion; but it will not come anywhere near the first scenes. We shall have a dialogue in longish speeches, each more or less balanced against its fellow, beautiful no doubt and perhaps moving, but slow as music is slow. Or we shall have a lyrical scene, strophe exactly balanced against antistrophe, more beautiful but slower still in its movement, and often at first hearing a little difficult to follow. Poetry is there and drama is there, and character and plot interest; but often they are unrolled before you not as things immediately happening, but as things to feel and reflect upon. It is a bigger world than ours and every movement in it is slower and larger.