looking upon its tragedy, will see in it only the _macabre_, and feel
that graveyard and spectral air which breathes about the haunted pagan
sepulchre.

Another myth in which we see the contrast between essential paganism and
idealism is that of Orpheus. The myth appears in countless forms and
with innumerable excrescences, but in the main it is in three successive
parts. The first of these tells of the sweet singer loved by all the
creatures, the dear friend of all the world, whose charm nothing that
lived on earth could resist, and whose spell hurt no creature whom it
allured. The conception stands in sharp contrast to the ghastly statuary
that adorned Medusa's precincts. Here, with a song whose sweetness
surpassed that of the Sirens, nature, dead and living both (for all
lived unto Orpheus), followed him with glad and loving movement. Nay,
not only beasts and trees, but stones themselves and even mountains,
felt in the hard heart of them the power of this sweet music. It is one
of the most perfect stories ever told--the precursor of the legends that
gathered round Francis of Assisi and many a later saint and artist. It
is the prophecy from the earliest days of that consummation of which
Isaiah was afterwards to sing and St. Paul to echo the song, when nature
herself would come to the perfect reconciliation for which she had been
groaning and travailing through all the years.

The second part of the story tells of the tragedy of love. Such a man as
Orpheus, if he be fortunate in his love, will love wonderfully, and
Eurydice is his worthy bride. Dying, bitten by a snake in the grass as
she flees from danger, she descends to Hades. But the surpassing love of
the sweet singer dares to enter that august shadow, not to drink the
Waters of Lethe only and to forget, but also to drink the waters of
Eunoe and to remember. His music charms the dead, and those who have the