A giddy sonorous scene of portents and surprises follows--a distant, exaggerated, dramatic reflex of that old thundering tumult of the festival in the vineyard--in which Dionysus reappears, miraculously set free from his bonds. First, in answer to the deep-toned invocation of the chorus, a great voice is heard from within, proclaiming him to be the son of Semele and Zeus. Then, amid the short, broken, rapturous cries of the women of the chorus, proclaiming him master, the noise of an earthquake passes slowly; the pillars of the palace are seen waving to and fro; while the strange, memorial fire from the tomb of Semele blazes up and envelopes the whole building. The terrified women fling themselves on the ground; and then, at last, as the place is shaken open, Dionysus is seen stepping out from among the tottering masses of the mimic palace, bidding them arise and fear not. But just here comes a long pause in the action of the play, in which we must listen to a messenger newly arrived from the glens, to tell us what he has seen there, among the Maenads. The singular, somewhat sinister beauty of this speech, and a [71] similar one subsequent--a fair description of morning on the mountain-tops, with the Bacchic women sleeping, which turns suddenly to a hard, coarse picture of animals cruelly rent--is one of the special curiosities which distinguish this play; and, as it is wholly narrative, I shall give it in English prose, abbreviating, here and there, some details which seem to have but a metrical value:--
"I was driving my herd of cattle to the summit of the scaur to feed, what time the sun sent forth his earliest beams to warm the earth. And lo! three companies of women, and at the head of one of them Autonoe, thy mother Agave at the head of the second, and Ino at the head of the third. And they all slept, with limbs relaxed, leaned against the low boughs of the pines, or with head thrown heedlessly among the oak-leaves strewn upon the ground--all in the sleep of temperance, not, as thou saidst, pursuing Cypris through the solitudes of the forest, drunken with wine, amid the low rustling of the lotus-pipe.
"And thy mother, when she heard the lowing of the kine, stood up in the midst of them, and cried to them to shake off sleep. And they, casting slumber from their eyes, started upright, a marvel of beauty and order, young and old and maidens yet unmarried. And first, they let fall their hair upon their shoulders; and those [72] whose cinctures were unbound re-composed the spotted fawn-skins, knotting them about with snakes, which rose and licked them on the chin. Some, lately mothers, who with breasts still swelling had left their babes behind, nursed in their arms antelopes, or wild whelps of wolves, and yielded them their milk to drink; and upon their heads they placed crowns of ivy or of oak, or of flowering convolvulus. Then one, taking a thyrsus-wand, struck with it upon a rock, and thereupon leapt out a fine rain of water; another let down a reed upon the earth, and a fount of wine was sent forth there; and those whose thirst was for a white stream, skimming the surface with their finger-tips, gathered from it abundance of milk; and from the ivy of the mystic wands streams of honey distilled. Verily! hadst thou seen these things, thou wouldst have worshipped whom now thou revilest.