That light is in the soul,
The soul in every part.”—Milton.
Pot. has allowed himself to be led quite astray here by a petulant criticism of De Pauw.
“The gleeless song, and the lyreless strain.”
ὕμνος ἀφόρμιγκτος. “The musical character of this Choral Hymn must be imagined as working upon the feelings with a certain solemn grandeur. The κιθάρα or lyre is silent; an instrument which, as the Greeks used it, always exercised a soothing power, restorative of the equipoise of the mind: only the flute is heard, whose notes, according to the unanimous testimony of antiquity, excited feelings, now of thrilling excitement, now of mute awe; always, however, disturbing the just emotional tenor of the soul. Assuredly the ὕμνος ἀφόρμιγκτος in this place is no mere phrase.”—Müller.
“This work of labour earnest.”
I have paraphrased, or rather interpolated, in this Antistrophe, a little, because I do not see much in it that is either translatable or worth translating. A meaning has been squeezed out of the two lines beginning σπευδόμενοι; but one cannot help feeling, after all, that there is something wrong, and saying with honest Wellauer, “certi nihil video.” The main idea, shimmering through the first three lines, is plain enough—that the Furies exercise a function, the legitimacy of which no one is entitled to question. This the words, μηδ ες ἄγκρισιν ἐλθεῖν, plainly indicate; and it is upon this, and Schoe.’s conjectural emendation of the first line—
σπευδομένος ἀπέχειν τινὰ τᾶσδε μερίμνας,