the piercing simplicity of which, as well as the theme, suggests Wordsworth. The lustral bowls, he is careful to tell us, are “the work of a skilled craftsman”;[379] he is almost on the point of telling us his name—one can imagine the boy of eighty years ago gazing on these cups, and his first sense of beauty in workmanship. Those who would offer sacrifice will find dwelling on the spot a sacristan to instruct and aid them.[380] Everything on this ground is both familiar and hallowed; the mysterious “brazen threshold,” the statues of local deities and heroes, the hollow pear-tree, and the other local sanctities are carefully particularized, so that the calm beauty of the country-side and the terrors of religion are strangely and beautifully interwoven. As for religion in the broader, profounder sense, we have as elsewhere a reference of human suffering merely to an inscrutable, divine purpose.[381] But the dramatist indicates carefully the contribution of human nature to the fulfilment of the oracles; Polynices[382] becomes subject to his father’s curse because his own sense of honour forbids him to relinquish his foredoomed enterprise. Œdipus himself has attained to a wiser conception of sin[383] than that which rules him at the close of the _Tyrannus_. He has acted wrongly, therefore his suffering is just; but he is morally innocent, and his past actions afflict him as sorrows, not as crimes.[384] * * * * * The fragments of the lost plays are on the whole disappointing; a large proportion are single rare words quoted by ancient lexicographers, and most of the rest are short sentences or phrases. There remain the few longer fragments, to which in recent years important additions have been made.