The silence of the grave now reigns in the chamber. Nothing is heard but the deep breathing of those weird women cowering on the floor, wrapped in their mantles, the head sunk upon the breast, expressing the deepest grief in the manner customary among the ancient Greeks, whose artists represent those overwhelmed with sorrow as covering the head and concealing the face. Nature herself has given the human being only two ways of indicating extreme suffering—the irrepressible outburst of feeling in the loud cry in which the whole vital energy seems to concentrate itself, and the profound silence in which the vital energies sink into stupor. Suddenly one of the women springs out of the cowering circle, and, like an inspired seeress, begins the song upon the dead. She chants it _in recitativo_, strophe after strophe, ending each with a wo! wo! wo! which the chorus of wailers repeat, as in the Greek tragedy. The woman who thus sings and leads the chorus, has also composed the dirge, or has improvised it as she sang. In Sardinia, it is usually the youngest girl who leads. As a general rule, these songs of revenge or of eulogy, in which the praise of the dead is mingled with complaint for his loss, or with calls for vengeance on his murderers, are improvised on the spot. How strangely contradictory to the culture of our time the state of things in a country where we can still witness scenes like these, which seem separated from our present European civilisation by a gulf of three thousand years! Let the reader imagine, then, the corpse upon the tola, the women crouching round it on the ground; a young girl rises, and, her countenance flaming with enthusiasm, improvises, like a Miriam or a Sappho, verses of the most surpassing grace, and full of the boldest images; exhaustlessly her wrapt soul pours forth the rhythmic stream of dithyrambs, which express melodiously all that is deepest and highest in human sorrow. The chorus wails at the close of each strophe, Deh! deh! deh! I know not whether anywhere in the world a picture could be found, which combines the repulsive with the beautiful in a manner so profoundly poetical and significant as such a scene, where a maiden sings before a bier what her pure young soul has that moment been inspired with, while a chorus of Furies howl the accompaniment; or where a girl, with flaming eye and glowing cheek, rises like an Erinnys over her murdered brother who lies armed upon the tola, and imprecates vengeance in verses whose fierce and bloody language no male lips could utter more relentlessly. In this country, where the position of woman is low and menial, it is nevertheless woman that sits in judgment, and summons the criminal before the tribunal of her plaint. Thus, too, the chorus of the maid-servants, in the Libation-bearers of Æschylus, sings—