Hail, bright and blest one! grant to me
The smiles of glad prosperity.'
Thus shall he own her name divine,
Thus bend him at Alcestis' shrine.'


The story, however, bore that Hercules, descending in the course of one
of his labors into the realms of the dead, rescued Alcestis, and brought
her back; and Euripides gives a scene in which the rough, jovial
Hercules insists on the sorrowful Admetus marrying again a lady of his
own choice, and gives the veiled Alcestis back to him as the new bride.
Later Greeks tried to explain the story by saying that Alcestis nursed
her husband through an infectious fever, caught it herself, and had been
supposed to be dead, when a skilful physician restored her; but this is
probably only one of the many reasonable versions they tried to give of
the old tales that were founded on the decay and revival of nature in
winter and spring, and with a presage running through them of sacrifice,
death, and resurrection. Our own poet Chaucer was a great admirer of
Alcestis, and improved upon the legend by turning her into his favorite
flower---


'The daisie or els the eye of the daie,
The emprise and the floure of flouris all'.


Another Greek legend told of the maiden of Thebes, one of the most self-
devoted beings that could be conceived by a fancy untrained in the
knowledge of Divine Perfection. It cannot be known how much of her story
is true, but it was one that went deep into the hearts of Grecian men