Orpheus and Eurydice, which has been utilized by many artists during more
than two thousand years assuredly, and how much longer no one knows.
Virgil told it in the _Georgics_ and Ovid in the _Metamorphoses_. It
became a favorite theme of medieval romance, and whether told in a French
_lai_ or Scottish ballad like "King Orfeo," it still keeps, among all the
strange transformations which it has undergone, "the freshness of the
early world." Let us condense the story from King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon
version of Boethius's _De Consolatione Philosophiae_: "There was once a
famous Thracian harper named Orpheus who had a beautiful wife named
Eurydice. She died and went to hell. Orpheus longed sorrowfully for her,
harping so sweetly that the very woods and wild beasts listened to his
woe. Finally, he resolved to seek her in hell and win her back by his
skill. And he played so marvelously there that the King of Hell to reward
him gave him back his wife again, only upon the condition that he should
not turn back to look at her as he led her forth. But, alas, who can
constrain love? When Orpheus came to the boundary of darkness and light,
he turned round to see if his wife was following--and she vanished."

Such was the myth in one of its manifold European forms. It deals
obviously with a succession of events, with actions easily narratable by
means of a "time-art" like poetry. The myth itself is one of fascinating
human interest, and if a prose writer like Hawthorne had chosen to tell it
in his _Wonder-Book_, we should doubtless speak of it as a "poetic" story.
We should mean, in using that adjective, that the myth contained
sentiment, imagination, passion, dramatic climax, pathos--the qualities
which we commonly associate with poetry--and that Hawthorne, although a
prose writer, had such an exquisite sympathy for Greek stories that his
handling of the material would be as delicate, and the result possibly as
lovely, as if the tale had been told in verse. But if we would realize the
full value of Lessing's distinction, we must turn to one of the countless