I can
now at length see that Sophocles is the most perfect. Yet he never rises to
the sublime simplicity of AEschylus--simplicity of design, I mean--nor
diffuses himself in the passionate outpourings of Euripides. I understand
why the ancients called Euripides the most tragic of their dramatists: he
evidently embraces within the scope of the tragic poet many passions,--
love, conjugal affection, jealousy, and so on, which Sophocles seems to
have considered as incongruous with the ideal statuesqueness of the tragic
drama. Certainly Euripides was a greater poet in the abstract than
Sophocles. His choruses may be faulty as choruses, but how beautiful and
affecting they are as odes and songs! I think the famous [Greek: Euippoy
Xene], in Oedipus Coloneus[1] cold in comparison with many of the odes of
Euripides, as that song of the chorus in the Hippolytus--[Greek: "Eoos,"
Eoos[2]] and so on; and I remember a choric ode in the Hecuba, which always
struck me as exquisitely rich and finished; I mean, where the chorus speaks
of Troy and the night of the capture.[3]
There is nothing very surprising in Milton's preference of Euripides,
though so unlike himself. It is very common--very natural--for men to
_like_ and even admire an exhibition of power very different in kind from
any thing of their own.
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