there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only
conjecture the meaning.--In all this criticism, let me say, one
is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor
Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need
to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from
the eternal.--Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make
it, I think, any translation of the _Agamemnon_--which so many
have tried to translate--would be fatiguing and a great bore to
read. It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel's
_David and Bethsabe,_ which have been often called Aeschylean
in audacity:--

"At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning on his hateful wings;"

His--the thunder's--fair spouse is the lightning. Imagine
images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out
in language terse, sudden, lofty--and you may get an idea of what
this eagle's bark was like. And the word that came rasping and
resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens
then and the world since to hear, was KARMA.

He took that theme, and drove it home, and drove it home, and
drove it home. Athens disregarded the rights and sufferings of
others; was in fact abominably cruel. Well; she should hear about
Karma; and in such a way that she should--no, but she _should_--
give ear. Karma punished wrong-doing. It was wrong-doing that
Karma punished. You could not do wrong with impunity.--The common
thought was that any extreme of good fortune was apt to rouse the