The third part of the story is no less interesting and significant.  Maddened with this second loss, so irrevocable and yet due to so avoidable a cause, Orpheus, in restless despair, wandered about the lands.  For him the nymphs had now no attractions, nor was there anything in all the world but the thought of his half-regained Eurydice, now lost for ever.  His music indeed remained, nor did he cast away his lute; but it was heard only in the most savage and lonely places.  At length wild Thracian women heard it, furious in the rites of Dionysus.  They desired him, but his heart was elsewhere, and, in the mad reaction of their savage breasts, when he refused them they tore him limb from limb.  He was buried near the river Hebrus, and his head was thrown into the stream.  But as the waters bore it down, the lips whose singing had charmed the world still repeated the beloved name Eurydice to the waters as they flowed.

Here again it is as if, searching for the dead in some ancient sepulchre, we had found a living man and friend.  The symbolism of the story, disentangled from detail which may have been true enough in a lesser way, is clear to every reader.  It tells that love is strong as death—­that old sweet assurance which the lover in Canticles also discovered.  Love is indeed set here under conditions, or rather it has perceived the conditions which the order of things has set, and these conditions have been violated.  But still the voice of the severed head, crying out the beloved name as the waters bore it to the sea, speaks in its own exquisite way the final word.  It gives the same assurance with the same thrill which we feel when we read the story of Herakles wrestling with death for the body of Alkestis, and winning the woman back from her very tomb.

But before love can be a match for death, it first must conquer life, and the early story of the power of Orpheus over the wild beasts, restoring, as it does, an earthly paradise in which there is nothing but gentleness, marks the conquest of life by love.  All life’s wildness and savagery, which seem to give the lie to love continually, are after all conquerable and may be tamed.  And the lesson of it all is the great persuasion that in the depth of things life is good and not evil.  When we come to the second conflict, and that love which has mastered life now pits itself against death, it goes forward to the greater adventure with a strange confidence.  Who that has looked upon the face of one dearly beloved who is dead, has not known the leap of the spirit, not so much in rebellion as in demand?  Love is so great a thing that it obviously ought to have this power, and somehow we are all persuaded that it has it—­that death is but a puppet king, and love the master of the universe after all.  The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is but a faltering expression of this great assurance, yet it does express it.