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The architect of Bourges Cathedral liked hawthorns; so he has covered his porch with hawthorn, it is a perfect Niobe of May. Never was such hawthorn; you would try to gather it forthwith, but for fear of being pricked. The old Lombard architects liked hunting; so they covered their work with horses and hounds, and men blowing trumpets two yards long.
Then Pirithous remained in undisturbed possession of his bride, and on the following morning Theseus departed, bidding farewell to his friend. The common fight had quickly welded the fresh tie of their brotherhood into an indestructible bond. Niobe, Queen of Thebes, was proud of many things.
"I suppose you will try and blacken her character and have her sent out of the post, and so rob us of the last relic I have of my home and f-f-friends," and Mrs. Forrest began to sob afresh. "Hush! Ruth. I hear the doctor in the hall below. For goodness' sake, do try and look a little less like a modern Niobe when he comes up.
There are not only dramatic dialogue and movement, but dramatic monologue and episode. For illustration, we might refer to Hagar in the wilderness. Her tragic loneliness and shuddering despair alight upon the page of Scripture with the interest that attends the introduction of the veiled Niobe with her children into the Grecian theatre.
His creed on such subjects will no more influence his poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a painter may have conceived respecting the lachrymal glands, or the circulation of the blood, will affect the tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one.
The slaughter of the children of Niobe by Apollo, alludes to the Greek belief that pestilence and illness were sent by Apollo, and one dying by sickness was said to be struck by Apollo's arrow. It is to this that Morris alludes in the Earthly Paradise: "While from the freshness of his blue abode, Glad his death-bearing arrows to forget, The broad sun blazed, nor scattered plagues as yet."
The story of Niobe has furnished Byron with a fine illustration of the fallen condition of modern Rome: "The Niobe of nations! there she stands, Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her withered hands, Whose holy dust was scattered long ago; The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now: The very sepulchres lie tenantless Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow, Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness?
The Minerva Medica, Niobe, Apollo, the Faun, the Torso Belvedere, the Apollo Belvedere, and a thousand others; above all, that miracle of ancient art the Laocoon: "A father's love and mortal's agony, With an immortal's patience blending: vain The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain And gripe, and deepening of the dragon's grasp, The old man's clench; the long envenom'd chain Rivets the living links, the enormous asp Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp."
Collecting himself for a last effort, he represented the Goddess of Liberty, like Niobe, all tears, weeping over the fate of her children, should the iniquity, contemplated by Ketchum, be consummated.
Do you remember, my dear Madame de Camps, that in 1831 you and I went together to the Beaux-Arts to see the exhibition of works which were competing for the Grand Prix in sculpture? The subject given out for competition was Niobe weeping for her children. Do you also remember my indignation at one of the competing works around which the crowd was so compact that we could scarcely approach it?
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