The Bennington banner. [volume] (Bennington, Vt.) 1858-1894, 1891-10-23
SOME HERoINEs OF HISTORY AND
LEGEND.

together with seventeen other skeletons.
Inspired with vague feelings of regret,
and even tenderer emotion, the young
man muses. over the horror of the hot
ashes of Vesuvius that destroyed this
fair creature twenty centuries ago. Alb
sorbed in these meditations, he visits
Pompeii, passes the night in the ruins,
and in the Authorizations of his over eX-
cited brain sees the town restored and
the streets full of people, and even wit
nesses a performance of Plautu's Casino
at the theatre, where in the audience he
remarks a woman of marvellous beauty,
ARIA Marcella, daughter of Arrius Do
modes. The poet describes, with many
romantic details, the adventures of Octa-
wien, whom, at their first meeting in the
dream-city, ARIA Marcella thus greets in
memorable words:
"Oh, when in the museum thou didst
stop to contemplate the bit of hardened
clay that preserves my shape, and when
thy thoughts yearned ardently towards
me, my soul felt it in this world, where
| float invisible to coarse eyes; it is belief
that makes the god, it is love that make
the woman. One is. truly dead only
when one is no longer loved; thy desire
has restored me to life; the mighty evo-
cation of thy heart has suppressed the
distance that separated u.s."
e
pressed by the young Pompeiian is one
that has inspired many beautiful ffctions,
and formed part of the philosopbic creed
of many poets and dreamers. What is
more consoling than to think that moth
ing dies, that everything exists forever,
and that no force can annihilate that
which has once lived? Every action,
word. form, or thought that falls into
the universal ocean of things produces
circles that 60 on widening to the con-
fines eff eternity.
The material figuration disappears
only for vulgar eyes. The phantoms of
the past people infnity. Paris con-
tinues to carry off Helen in an I'M
known region of space. Theodore rules
an empire and her husband. The galley
of Cleopatra swells its silken sails ON the
blue waters of an ideal Cydnus. And as
Faust ravshed the daughter of Tyndarus
from the mysterious depths of Hades,
and hid her away for worship in the Sc
cret alcoves of his Gothic stronghold, so
have certain passionate and puissant
minds been,able to bring back to them
selves ages that were apparently past,
and to resuscitate personages that were,
as all believed, dead And yet why
should we seek to narrow our horizon by
dividing ages into dead or living, ancient
or modern? OF the centuries that are
past, we can count scarcely fifty. In
our individual lives we have but just
time enough to wall, to blink at the sun,
and to ask what it all means. Life alone
exists, and that which is living is alone
true and eternally modern, to whatever
epoch it may belong. 1t is the province
of art to affirm life. 1t is thanks to art
that the Greek Helen is almost our con-
temporary.
Some have spoken evil of women; 9th
ers, the majority have eulogized them
even to hyperbole; others still have re-
manned dazzled by the complex mystery
of femininity; some few, in the depths
of their despair of ever cOmprehending
the enigma, have declared that woman
is not the female of man, but some
strange daughter of Lilith, creature of
another race. The beauty of woman, the
pessimists will tell US, is one of the
many pitfalls and tricks invented by
ironical nature in order to ensnare men,
and perpetuate that undesirable and I'M
delightful interruption of nirudnd which
is called life. Be that as it may, femi-
nine beauty is phenomenon which has
always been of absorbing interest since
the world began. La beaute Uaut la Uertm
("beauty is as good as virtu'O, a modern
thinker has said in a volume of grave
historical speculations, and the philoso-
piers paradox is confirmed in a sense
by the instructive memory of humanity.
History does not forget those women
who have been notorious for their virtue,
but it remembers with indulgence the
women whose beauty was more notorious
than their virtue. The gentleness of
Ruth is contrasted in our memories with
the tragic heroism of Judith; Martha
and the repentant Magdalene are held in
equal honor in the HantheOn of virtue;
but Herodias and Sabine are remem-
bered for their grace as well as for their
cruelty. Wecannot speak of the glori-
Gus days of Greece without mentioning
Phryne and Aspasia. We delight in the
domestic and virginia. purity of Nausikae;
but who shall dare to arraign Helen, and
to condemn her mysterious and enchant.
ing memory at the bar of austere moral
ity?-Tbeodore child, in Harper's Bazdr.
The resignation of Hermann Oelrich