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I can only compare with that excited by the Cassandra of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. For the reader to feel this, he must have present in memory the circumstances of England in 1637. He must place himself as far as possible in the situation of a contemporary.
Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman speech. It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments. But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them.
I suppose Jupiter had it instead, just then Hebe pouring it, and Juno's ox-eyes bellowing their splendour at it, if you will forgive me that broken metaphor, for the sake of Aeschylus's genius, and my own particular intoxication. Indeed, there never was, in modern days, such wine. Flush, to whom I offered the last drop in my glass, felt it was supernatural, and ran away.
"The will of Jove I own, Who mortals and immortals rules alone." Homer, II.xii Saturn and Rhea were of the race of Titans, who were the children of Earth and Heaven, which sprang from Chaos, of which we shall give a further account in our next chapter. In allusion to the dethronement of Ouranos by Kronos, and of Kronos or Saturnus by Zeus or Jupiter, Prometheus says in AEschylus's tragedy,
Gabriel's it was popularly supposed that Master Pericles Aeschylus, Mr. Macrae's infant son, was turned to correct my Latin prose, though my Iambics were withheld from him at the request of the family doctor. The letter which Pericles Aeschylus's father had addressed to me was one of the pleasantest surprises I have ever had. It ran as follows: St. Gabriel's College, Cambridge.
Ah, that it were to be my fate to go down to posterity as the happy man who once more revived Aeschylus's masterpieces on a Grecian stage! But Is there not, begging the pardon of the great tragedian, too much reserve in the Agamemnon for our modern taste?
Compare them with Homer's grand breathing personalities, with Aeschylus's nay, but I cannot bear upon my lips or finger the charge of the blasphemy of such comparing, even for religion's sake.... I had another letter from America a few days since, from an American poet of Boston who is establishing a magazine, and asked for contributions from my pen.
Even his eyes, those large round hazel eyes, had extinguished their fire. For a second he clasped my hand in his own thin, lifeless one, and repeated, in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper, Aeschylus's words: 'Oh, this life of man! Such was the unhappy and irresolute heart that found itself united to one of the most daring geniuses in the world.
But pleasures, like gales of soft wind, move simpering, one towards one extreme of the body and another towards another, and then go off in a vapor. Nor are they of any long durance, but, as so many glancing meteors, they are no sooner kindled in the body than they are quenched by it. As to pain, Aeschylus's Philoctetes affords us a sufficient testimony:
Do let him understand how obliged to him I am for permitting me to look, for a moment, according to his view of the question. Perhaps my poetical sense is not convinced all through, and certainly my critical sense is not worth convincing, but I am delighted to be able to call by the name of Aeschylus, under the authority of Mr. You hear Aeschylus's footsteps and voice in the lines.
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