‘Aeschylus’ bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,’

which compensates for the more than Greek—­unintelligibility of Browning’s version of the Agamemnon: it gives you some color, some adumbration of the being and import of the man.  How shall we compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain of Song?  Shakespeare—­as I think—­throned upon a peak where are storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind:  Dante—­a prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,—­only to correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within that he knew better;—­this Universe for him but the crust and excoriata of the Universe of the Soul.  Milton—­a Titan Soul hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep to enunciate—­just to proclaim and put on everlasting record—­ those two profound significant words, Titan and Soul, for a memorial to Man of the real nature of Man.  Aeschylus—­the barking of an eagle—­of Zeus the Thunderer’s own eagle out of ominous skies above the mountains:  a thing unseen as Karma, mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh, perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand; immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;—­ ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark tremendous destinies;—­and yet he too with serenity and the Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us:  he will not leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas’ wand and will they are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.

Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves on the minds of those who know him.  They bear testimony to the fact that, however grand his style—­like a Milton Carlylized in poetry—­thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling for expression through a vehicle less than itself.

Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps:  “His genius is so near the verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into the ridiculous”; and he goes on to say that you might find the nearest echo of his diction in Shelley’s Prometheus; but of his diction alone; for “his power is in concentration—­that of Shelley in diffuseness.”  “The intellectuality of Shelley,” he says, “destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command over the passions.  The interest he excites is startling, terrible, intense.”  Browning tried to bring over the style; but left the thought, in an English Double-Dutched, far remoter than he found it from our understanding.  The thought demands in English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is not crystal-clear:  so close-packed and vast are the ideas that there are lines on lines