And then his female characters, in which above all things he excels. Not Imogen herself, whose breath like violets perfumes the page of Shakespeare, rises before us a more exquisite vision than Antigone, in her maiden purity, her unfathomable tenderness, her holy affection, filial and fraternal. Even Œdipos, supported and led into the light by such a daughter, appears glorious as a god, his involuntary stains worked off by years of suffering, his reverend old age garlanded by calamity, wreathed with the tendrils and snowy blossoms of a daughter’s love. And Tecmessa, does she not seem to be Desdemona ripened into a mother? There is no poet who has pourtrayed a wife of more unmingled gentleness, or who has better sounded the depths of a mother’s heart. Her affection expands like an atmosphere round the boy Eurysaces, menaced at once by treacherous enemies and by his father’s madness, and casts a pure and bright ray over the sea of blood and stormy passion and guilt that floats around her. His Dejanira, likewise, is a character of great beauty; but in the Clytemnæstra and Electra, in the Chrysothemis and Ismene, he has been less successful. Among his male characters Œdipos is the masterpiece. Compounded of ungovernable passion, a powerful will, a resolution invincible by suffering, extreme in love or hate, he stands before us in heroic grandeur, and like the sun’s orb dilates as he descends beneath the horizon. Next to him in originality and beauty are Neoptolemos and Teucer, youths of the greatest nobleness of soul, who contrast strikingly with his fox-like Odysseus and the mean-souled imperial brothers. To Sophocles succeeds Euripides,[991] whose genius inspired Milton with the deepest admiration, as it had before inspired Aristotle. Resembling Sophocles as little as the latter resembles Æschylus, he is more deeply imbued than either with the tragic spirit, interprets more unerringly the language of passion and the heart, and unlocks more surely the hidden springs of pity. In him, however, poetry is less an instinct than an art. His intellect, lofty, powerful, penetrating, ranged through the most untrodden paths of nature and philosophy, grasped at all learning, at all experience, enriched itself with prodigious stores of reflections, observations, imagery, over which it possessed the most perfect mastery, to render them subservient to the purposes of the drama. Other poets learned in effects, may exhibit action with no less truth and skill; Euripides dares to unveil causes, to give the wherefore and the why of actions, to descend into the abysses of the mind and lay bare the curious mechanism, and, so to say, central fires which produce and ripen our resolutions and our demeanour. Footnote 991: This writer, like most of his poetical contemporaries, used constantly to wear a tablet and stylus suspended to his dress.—Athen. xiii. 45. The use in fact of memorandum books was common.—Sch. Aristoph. Vesp. 529.