And now, having reviewed the incidents of the story, in what respect is it that we object to the solution of the Sphinx's riddle? We do not object to it as _a_ solution of the riddle, and the only one possible at the moment; but what we contend is, that it is not _the_ solution. All great prophecies, all great mysteries, are likely to involve double, triple, or even quadruple interpretations-- each rising in dignity, each cryptically involving another. Even amongst natural agencies, precisely as they rise in grandeur, they multiply their final purposes. Rivers and seas, for instance, are useful, not merely as means of separating nations from each other, but also as means of uniting them; not merely as baths and for all purposes of washing and cleansing, but also as reservoirs of fish, as high-roads for the conveyance of commodities, as permanent sources of agricultural fertility, &c. In like manner, a mystery of any sort, having a public reference, may be presumed to couch within it a secondary and a profounder interpretation. The reader may think that the Sphinx ought to have understood her own riddle best; and that, if _she_ were satisfied with the answer of Œdipus, it must be impertinent in us at this time of day to censure it. To censure, indeed, is more than we propose. The solution of Œdipus was a true one; and it was all that he _could_ have given in that early period of his life. But, perhaps, at the moment of his death amongst the gloomy thickets of Attica, he might have been able to suggest another and a better. If not, then we have the satisfaction of thinking ourselves somewhat less dense than Œdipus; for, in our opinion, the full and _final_ answer to the Sphinx's riddle lay in the word ŒDIPUS. Œdipus himself it was that fulfilled the conditions of the enigma. He it was, in the most pathetic sense, that went upon four feet when an infant; for the general condition of helplessness attached to all mankind in the period of infancy, and which is expressed symbolically by this image of creeping, applied to Œdipus in a far more significant manner, as one abandoned by all his natural protectors, thrown upon the chances of a wilderness, and upon the mercies of a slave. The allusion to this general helplessness had, besides, a special propriety in the case of Œdipus, who drew his very name (_Swollen-foot_) from the injury done to his infant feet. He, again, it was that, in a more emphatic sense than usual, asserted that majestic self-sufficientness and independence of all alien aid, which is typified by the act of walking upright at noonday upon his own natural basis. Throwing off all the power and splendor borrowed from his royal protectors at Corinth, trusting exclusively to his native powers as a man, he had fought his way through insult to the presence of the dreadful Sphinx; her he had confounded and vanquished; he had leaped into a throne,--the throne of him who had insulted him,--without other resources than such as he drew