But certainly it is plain that the Eleusinia, as being more central, more purely spiritual, must in the thought of Greece have risen high above the drama.  The very dress in which the mystae were initiated was preserved as most sacred or deposited in the temple.  Or if we insist upon measuring their appreciation of the Festival by the more palpable standard of numbers,—­the temple at Eleusis, by the account of Strabo, was capable of holding even in its mystic cell more persons than the theatre.  To be sure, the celebration was only once in five years,—­but it was all the more sacred from this very infrequency.  Nothing in all Greece—­and that is saying very much—­could compare with it in its depth of divine mystery.  If anything could, it would have been the drama; but no wailings were ever heard from beneath the masks of the stage like the wailings of Achtheia,—­no jubilant song of the Chorus ever rose like the paean of Dionysiac triumph.

* * * * *

Thus was the name of Dionysus connected with the palace and the temple, with the sepulchral court of death and the dramatic representations of life,—­and everywhere associated with our Lady.

Sometimes, indeed, she seems to overshadow and hide him from our vision.  Thus was it when the Eumenides in their final triumph swept the stage, and victory seemed all in the hands of invisible Powers, with no human participant:  even as throughout the Homeric epos there runs an undercurrent of unutterable sadness; because, while to the Gods there ever remains a sure seat upon Olympus, unshaken by the winds, untouched by rain or snow, crowned with a cloudless radiance,—­yet upon man come vanity, sorrow, and strife; like the leaves of the forest he flourisheth, and then passeth away to the “weak heads of the dead,” ([Greek:  nekuon amenaena karaena],) conquered by purple Death and strong Fate.

To the eye of sense, and in the circumscribed movements of this world, the desolation seems complete and the defeat final.  But the snows of winter are necessary to the blossoms of spring,—­the waste of death to the resurrection of life; and from the vastest of all desolations does our Lady lead her children in the loftiest of all flights,—­even from all sorrow and solitude,—­from the wastes of earth and the desolation of AEons, to ineffable joy in her Saviour Lord.

* * * * *

VICTOR AND JACQUELINE.

I.

Jacqueline Gabrie and Elsie Meril could not occupy one room, and remain, either of them, indifferent to so much as might be manifested of the other’s inmost life.  They could not emigrate together, peasants from Domremy,—­Jacqueline so strong, Elsie so fair,—­could not labor in the same harvest-fields, children of old neighbors, without each being concerned in the welfare and affected by the circumstances of the other.