his own separate tragedy also. And when with his last words he requested
that a cock be sacrificed to Æsculapius, that, reader, was to indicate
that to him had come the eighth day of the drama, in which the Great
Physician brings deliverance,--and in the evening of which there should
be the final unveiling of the eyes in the presence of the Great
Hierophant!

Such were the Eleusinia of Greece. But what do they mean to us? We have
already hinted at their connection with the Sphinx's riddle. It is
through this connection that they receive their most general
significance; for this riddle is the riddle of the race, and the problem
which it involves can be adequately realized only in the life of the
race. To Greece, as peculiarly sensitive to all that is tragical, the
Sphinx connected her questions most intimately with human sorrow, either
in the individual or the household.

"Who is it," thus the riddle ran, "who is it that in the morning creeps
upon all-fours, touching the earth in complete dependence,--and at noon,
grown into the fulness of beauty and strength, walks erect with his face
toward heaven,--but at the going down of the sun, returns again to his
original frailty and dependence?"

This, answered Oedipus, is Man; and most fearfully did he realize it in
his own life! In the mysteries of the Eleusinia there is the same
prominence of human sorrow,--only here the Sphinx propounds her riddle
in its religious phase; and in the change from the _mystæ_ to the
_epoptæ_, in the revelation of the central self, was the great problem
symbolically realized.

Greece had her reckoning; and to her eye the Sphinx long ago seemed to