Would rest the changing seasons through.
Then follows a dialogue of warmly emotional feeling between the king and queen, in the interval of waiting for the chariot and attendants to be brought to the gate. All the physical side of the healing of Abgar has now been resolved into its spiritual meaning, and he reinterprets the words of the Nazarene’s message that of his infirmity he shall know full cure and those most dear to him have peace; but while Abgar speaks of his changed ideal, looking now to a “city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God,” a clamor is heard at the gate, and the body-slave rushes to the king with the tidings that armed troops approach the palace, and begs him to flee in the waiting chariot. Spurning thought of escape, the king and queen mount the dais and stand calmly watching in the moonlight the heroic spectacle of the approaching army. At this moment the queen’s women rush into the garden, demanding flight; the conflict begins along the wall; the gate bursts open, and Ananias retreats to the garden, wounded, and shortly dies. A brief interval of quiet, but full of portent, succeeds, when Stilbe, who had plotted with the king’s enemies, rushes through the gate, pursued by the soldiers and bleeding from wounds of their sabres. She is shot, apparently
by the hand of her former lover, Belarion, and falls dead at the king’s feet. Here Mr. Upson leaves an unravelled thread of his plot, or at least one for whose clew I have sought vainly. No cause has been shown for violence toward her on the part of the soldiers whom she aids, nor on that of her supposed lover and betrothed, Belarion. Why, then, she should become his victim, or why he should look upon her dead body and exclaim:
“Thus Fate helps out!”
is at least a riddle past my solving. If, as the results indicate, Belarion has been using Stilbe as a tool to aid his ambitions, it should scarcely have been related in good faith in the beginning of the drama that their marriage was to be celebrated the week in which the action of the play falls. If logical reasons exist for this change of front, Mr. Upson should have indicated them more clearly.
The climax of the play follows immediately upon the death of Stilbe, when the king, called to account by the insolent Belarion, in righteous indignation strikes him down. It may be questioned whether such a deed could follow so quickly upon the rapt spiritual state to which the king had been lifted; but one inclines to
rejoice that the natural man, impelled by who shall say what higher force, triumphed, ere the queen, pointing to the dead body of the trusted messenger, Ananias, and repeating the Nazarene’s words, “Those most dear to you have peace,”—demanded of the king his blade.
As they stand defenceless but assured, the soldiers, awed by the might of some inner force in the king, shrink back, and the drama closes with the victorious words,—
Together, Love, we go unto the city!
Though the play, looked upon from a dramatic standpoint, lacks in the earlier scenes a certain magnetism of touch and vividness of action, and in the last scene is somewhat overcharged with them, it has many finely conceived situations which strike the golden mean, and the characterization throughout is strongly defined. Its literary quality must, however, take precedence of its dramatic in the truer appraisal. In diction it shows none of the strained effort toward the supposed speech of an earlier time, which usually distinguishes poetic dramas laid far in the past, but has throughout a fitting dignity and harmony, combined with ease and flexibility of phrase and frequent eloquence of