Then a Queen;--a solitary woman, proud of her solitude, isolated in her regnant splendor, a dead planet like the moon, sung and pictured and adored, but keeping on her majestic path in awful beauty, deaf to human entreaty, cold to human love; a great statesman in a queen's robes; a keen, subtle politician, coifed and farthingaled; a revengeful sovereign; a deadly enemy; a woman who forgave nothing to a woman, and retaliated everything upon a man; she who brought unshrinkingly to death a sister queen discrowned and captive, a sister whose grace and loveliness and kindly aspect might have moved the lions of the arena to fawn upon her, but nowise disarmed the tigress who lapped her blood; she who banished and slew the man she would not stoop to love, because he dared to love another; and when death stared her in the face, and open-eyed judgment shook her soul, rose from that death-pallet to grapple and abuse a false woman, penitent for and confessing her falseness; a virgin-monarch, pitiless, relentless, cruel as jealousy; an anomalous woman, were she not a stone-born child of the Sphinx!
Or a great General, before whose iron will horse and horseman quailed and fled, like dry stubble before flame; who wielded the sword of Gideon, and cut off the armies of his kindred people and his anointed king as a mower fells the glittering grass on a summer dawn, heedless that he, too, shall be cut down from his flourishing. On his track fire and blood spread their banners, and the raven scented his trophies afar off; age and youth alike were crushed under the tread of his war-horse; honor and valor and life's best prime opposed him as summer opposes the Arctic hail-fury, and lay beaten into mire at his feet. Hated, feared, followed to the death; victorious or vanquished, the same strong, imperturbable, sullen nature; persistent rather than patient in effort, vigorously direct in action; a minister of unconscious good, of half-conscious evil; stern and gloomy to the sacrilegious climax of his well-battled life, even in the regicidal act going as one driven to his deeds by Fate that forgot God;--was he to be wondered at, whose life, in ages far gone, began among the stony Sphinx children?