reflections on life and morals, and at the end of the first pair of verses (strophes), turn to the special subject of the play with a change of metre and of melody.
It is, however, not true to say that the chorus generally represented the poet's own mind. As with Aristophanes, it is often in the soliloquies of the actors that we see through the mask, and find the poet behind his character. But we have lost the clue which no doubt existed, whereby some gesture or change of tone told the audience that here the poet, and not his personages or chorus, addressed them.
92. With the almost complete loss of Greek music, we have lost the melodies and musical accompaniments which are necessary to the full enjoyment of Greek lyric poetry. If we except the poets of Lesbos—Alcæus, Sappho, and Anacreon—who sang in short simple verses of uniform structure, all the higher and choral lyric poetry of the Greeks was composed in long and complicated stanzas, to which the phrasing of the melody, and the figures of the dance, gave the rhythmical key. We moderns use for a melody, which contains several musical phrases of various length and accent, the simple rhymes of our poetry, though they seldom embrace more than pairs of lines, which we expand and vary by repetitions. The Greek lyric poet made his poetical strophe to correspond with the whole melody, and thus introduced that more intricate system of long and short lines, and of various metres, which is so puzzling to the modern student. The early Greek poets seldom used refrains—the easiest way of accentuating rhythm. In addition to the splendid example in the choruses of Æschylus' Eumenides, where a dread incantation scene is wonderfully intensified by a refrain, there are but a few examples in Euripides' lyrics, in the Ion (v. 127), the Bacchæ (v. 877), and the Electra (v. 113). Yet with some practice it is possible to feel the majestic music of this larger and more artistic poetry. Here is one of the simpler specimens,
