Without the stern grandeur or the rich physical imagery of his predecessors, he could more surely touch the feelings and create an intense interest in the story of his tragedies. No man, moreover, has given birth to nobler sentiments. A moral beauty broods over his scenes; he elevates,—he enlarges,—he purifies the affections. Truths of greatest importance make themselves wings of melody in his verse, and fly across the gulf of two thousand years from him to us. Above all things, he may almost be said to have discovered the inexhaustible mine of love, whence he drew the gold that fashioned the divine image of Alcestis, the noblest mixture of earth’s mould that ever bore the name of woman. It is true this image is but dimly beheld. Perhaps no genius, not even Shakespeare’s, could have filled up the outline of unearthly beauty which Euripides dared to draw. It embodies all the imagination ever conceived of love. Pure as the celestial Artemis, impassioned to perfect disinterestedness, all devotion as a wife, all tenderness as a mother,—content to die, yet jealous of posthumous love,—sacrificing everything for her husband’s life, yet haunted by the fear that death might snap the golden links of affection, she issues forth like a celestial vision to take her farewell of the sun. Euripides might well be proud of this creation. Not Andromache, not Nausicaa, not even the far-famed consort of Odysseus can exceed in truth and beauty his conception of Alcestis. Yet this is the poet whom Aristophanes had the bad taste to overwhelm with unceasing ridicule, and whom numerous critics, borrowing their canons from him, have rashly pronounced languid and insipid. Moving on a level below this is the character of Electra in the Orestes. In the Alcestis we have rather the results than the developement of inexpressible love, which “raised a mortal to the skies.” But Electra’s affection unfolds itself before us. There she watches beside her brother’s bed, contending with the inexpiable guilt of matricide, sharing his remorse but comforting him, herself oppressed, yet courageously bearing up for his sake against the worst “ills that flesh is heir to.” With the most supreme delicacy is Polyxena conceived; and generally, whatever may be said of Euripides’ aversion for the sex, it may be affirmed that no poet has more ably or more nobly painted the female character.