122 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



fidelity of Penelope and the sacred hunger of her soul are sung once 

 more in beautiful lines ; and the drama ends effectively with husband 

 and wife in silent embrace by the brightening hearth, while the voice 

 of the minstrel is heard repeating the song: 



And she shall fall upon his breast 

 With never a spoken word. 



Howbeit, the love of the wanderer for Penelope, deep and abiding 

 though it proves, is not all that Calypso reads into it before she bids 

 the Ithacan leave her island; it is essentially a part of his longing 

 for home, one of the thousand calls ringing in his ears and summon- 

 ing him across the deep. As to dramatic motive the punishment 

 of the suitors and the portrayal of the character of the wave-worn, 

 steadfast, wily king play quite as large a part as the love between 

 husband and wife. 



In Nero love is only an incident, the Emperor's relations with 

 Poppaea being treated as a feature of the conspiracy against Agrip- 

 pina, a part of the policy of *' matching the mistress 'gainst the 

 mother — the noon of beauty against the evening of authority." 

 The drama is primarily an exposition of the development of an 

 "aesthete made omnipotent," of a dreamy, pampered youth with 

 a surface of polish and specious intentions who changes into a crazy 

 author-actor-musician with all the world for his theater. In oppo- 

 sition to him is drawn the imperious woman who would give life to 

 even the driest of annals, and if there is a central tragic point in the 

 play it is her murder, which has been acquiesced in rather than pro- 

 moted by the demented son. For this, however, he pays a wild 

 atonement by giving her flaming Rome for a funeral pyre; and the 

 curtain falls as Nero faints at the conclusion of his apostrophe to her 

 spirit and the flames that appease its rage. 



As to Faust there is little need of words. Here is matter for the 

 dramatic poets of all ages; each changing era of thought will justify 

 a new presentation of this eternal theme. At some not very distant 

 day we may have a Faust almost as different from Goethe's as his 

 was different from the mediaeval puppet show to which we trace its 



