To certainty well nigh-but yet, not certain,
Since cowards, tortured, may confess things false.
Philotas or conspired or else connived,
And each of these is capital, or changed
From keen to dullard in a sort that's death
In nature's capital code. I, in his place,
Had ta'en small umbrage at my days abridged :
There lived nor scope nor purpose in his life

Which death could mar.

The same court has judged Parmenio, who has gone to Ecbatana, and Alexander consents, despite Hephestion's earnest prayer, to the execution of the sentence. After a farewell to Alexander, which is one of the finest passages in the poem, and Alexander, after he has dismissed the generals, Hephestion with them, soliloquizes thus-affording another clear view of his many-sided character:

Hephestion's cause is stronger than he knows :
Parmenio's death will much perturb the army;
Yet he must die. He'll hear of his son's death
Ere my best speed could reach Ecbatana :
The troops around him there are as his children,
And, with the imperial treasury at his beck,
Nations will be his friends.

Parmenio's death will much perturb the army:
New wars will aptliest teach it to forget-

To India then! Thus stands my doubt resolved.

To that through all this tanglement I leant,

Yet knew it not till now.

Yon priest at Hierosolyma, 'tis true,

Spake much of Term and Limit. That's for others :
To grasp a world for me is feasible ;

To keep a half world, not.

Mr. Aubrey de Vere would have made his phrase stronger, and his antithesis more correct, by the substitution of "hold" for "keep" in the last line.

On his return from his successful expedition to India, Alexander again gives utterance to the religious problems which trouble him; but pride and success have worked their will with him, and the spiritual is fading fast. He has brought back with him Calanus, a Brahmin, and in his discussion with Hephestion of the strange faith which renders this man,-who asks nothing of the king but a funeral pyre to be furnished at his demand, so impervious to earthly ambition and human feeling, which makes his genuine disdain of all Alexander's achievements spontaneous as his breathing, and places him entirely beyond the reach of any surprise of the king's, the

following profound and noble passage occurs, with which we must close our quotations from illustrations of the king's character, before we proceed to examine the dramatic form and development of the poem :

We walk upon a world not knowable

Save in those things which knowledge least deserve,

Yet capable, not less, of task heroic.

My trust is in my work on that I fling me,

Trampling all questionings down.

HEPHESTION.

You've chased the foe like dreams.

ALEXANDER.

From realm to realm

I sometimes think

That I am less a person than a power,

Some engine in the right hand of the gods,

Some fateful wheel that, round in darkness rolling,
Knows this-its work; but not that work's far scope.
Hephestion, what is life? My life, since boyhood,
Hath been an agony of means to ends:

An ultimate end I find not. For that cause,

On reeling in the oppression of a void,

At times I welcome what I once scarce brook'd,

The opprobrium of blank sleep

In these, and many other passages, and by innumerable touches, the poet depicts the great Macedonian, and makes him live. In all, there is no touch of tenderness, no softening of the crystal brilliancy and hardness of the heroic ideal. As we shall presently see, this applies to even the one friendship of Alexander. With skill which demands our utmost admiration, Mr. Aubrey de Vere never brings Alexander on the scene together with the pure and lovely women who play their parts in the drama; not even with Sisygambis, the mother of Darius, of whom his conception is very noble and pathetic. So slight a circumstance does Alexander hold his

marriage with the daughter of the conquered Persian monarch, -apart from its political significance, that he merely alludes to it, between the speculative portion of his discourse with Hephestion, and a cunning order that the General shall deny to the army the lists of the dead, slain in the Indian campaign. A casual mention of his demeanour at the wedding feast is made by Ptolemy, the materialist and rationalist, who says:

My place was on the dais, near the queen :

The strong eye of the king made inquest ever,
As when we fight it roams the battle-field,
Around the hall.

There is no mention of the queen at his death, by Alexander, nor of him by her, in the exquisite scene which contrasts the powerful and pathetic close of the drama, wherein she muses by night over the incurable grief of her sister, Hephestion's widow, and pines for a dearer faith than the fire-worshipping philosophy of Persia, albeit it had consolations all unknown to any other system of Pagan times.

Next to the great study of Alexander which is the life of this noble and beautiful poem, is that of his beloved friend. Mr. Aubrey de Vere has formed an ideal of Hephestion which, while it absolutely contrasts with that of Alexander, is infinitely beautiful in its pure selflessness, its lofty gentleness, its true and tender humanity, its practical self-abnegation, its patient wisdom, its tranquil dutifulness and quiet courage, its justice, its tendency to reverie, and its immense power of loving. The most sympathizing, the most flawlessly true of friends to his great, dread sovereign, he is the wisest, most unflinching of counsellors, though often unheeded, and, himself untouched by ambition, undegraded by the actualities of that stormy and terrible decade of conquest, full of thought and yearning for the solution of the unseen world, he answers to every mood of his friend with all the dexterity and more than the intelligence of a woman. This surpassing love is the key-note of the drama, which has sweet, solemn undertones of a woman's love and lofty self-conquest in it too. Let us see how it is struck. The drama is in a series of tableaux, pauses between achievement and recommencement in the conqueror's career. The first act embraces the passage of the Granicus, and the conquest of Persia. The nascent treason of Philotas, and the discontent of Parmenio are indicated in the first scene, which takes place on the shore at Sestos, where the troops are about to be embarked. the first sentence spoken by Parmenio we find one of the gems

In

of expression, a phrase and a picture in one, with which the poem is thickly studded.

Calas, yon tide

Will try the nerves of your Thessalian steeds,

And point their boding ears.

In an instant the scene of the embarkation is before us, the high running surf, the dancing galleys, the rearing, recalcitrant horses, with the necks and the nostrils we know from the old friezes. The hurt pride, the snubbed selfimportance of the aged general, who had been the friend and guide of Philip of Macedon, his complaints of how this young man picks his brains, undoubting of his own superiority;—his unwilling, but honourable tribute to the youth's capacity as a general, an organizer, a handler of men, are our first taste of the quality of this drama. It is to Ptolemy, the future king of Egypt and historian of the wars, that Parmenio speaks his discontent, when Ptolemy has observed that Alexander "owes him much.'

A realm his father owed me,
And knew it well. The son is reverent, too,
But with a difference, sir. In Philip's time
My voice was Delphic on the battle-field:

This young man taps the springs of my experience
As though with water to allay his wine
Of keener inspirations. "Speak thy thought,
Parmenio!" Ere my words are half-way out
He nods approval, or he smiles dissent.
Still, there is like him none! I marvell'd oft
To see him breast that tempest from the north,
Drowning revolt in the Danubian wave.
The foe in sight, instant he knew their numbers;
If distant, guess'd their whereabout-how lay
The intermediate tract-if fordable

The streams-the vales accessible to horse :

'Twas like the craft of beasts remote from man.

The last line is one of the subtlest beauties of this poem. To appreciate it aright we must bind it up with that other great saying of Parmenio's (in the fourth act) when he and Philotas are journeying along the road to Rhago near the Caspian Gates; and Philotas half broaches to his father his treasonable projects, attempting to base them on Alexander's insanity, in which he has affected to believe since the king has claimed kinship with Achilles, and anointed the pillar on his grave

at Troy. The two sayings united form a wonderful definition of heroism illumined by genius. Philotas speaks :-

I grant his greatness were his godship sane!

But note his brow; 'tis Thought's least earthly temple:

Then mark, beneath, that round, not human eye,
Still glowing like a panther's! In his body
No passion dwells; but all his mind is passion,
Wild intellectual appetite and instinct,

That works without a law.

PARMENIO.

But half you know him.

There is a zigzag lightning in his brain

That flies in random flashes, yet not errs:

Chances his victories seem; but link those chances

And under them a science you shall find,

Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit,

Yea, contumelious oft to laws of war.
Fortune, that as a mistress smiles on others,

Serves him as duty-bound: her blood is he,
Born in the purple of her royalties.

The first glimpse afforded us of Alexander,-in a phrase of Seleucus (afterwards King of Syria, and of Asia to the Indus), -is finely contrived. Craterus, one of the generals, speaks:

He likes not Troy. His gaze, that's onward ever,

Like gaze of one that watches for the dawn,

Is bent to the earth.

SELEUCUS.

Far other beam'd it late,

When in mid-channel, lifting high the bowl,
He poured to great Poseidon and the nymphs
Their dues; far other when abroad he flung,

Nighing the shore, his spear, that shook for gladness,
Rooted in Asia's soil.

He

Alexander and Hephestion enter, and the conqueror haughtily questions the Trojans concerning the fanes, and alludes to the legend of his own descent from Zeus; alludes to it as a fable and a scandal, but it is there, in his brain, for all that. and Hephestion walk on togther, seeking Achilles' grave. When they reach it, Alexander anoints and crowns the pillar, and apostrophizes Achilles in lines which are to our thinking unmatched for expression of the loftiest form of the Pagan mind, the belief in the hereafter, the yearning for the real and the visible, the hopelessness in aught but the pale "shades;" the tribute still within the power of the living to