In man there's failure, only since he left The lower and inconscious forms of life. (ll. 125-126.) * * * * * Most progress is most failure. (l. 272.) With the opening out of wider possibilities to the mind comes the consciousness of the gulf between actuality and ideality. To Caliban, whose pleasurable conceptions of life are bounded by the prospect of defrauding Prospero of his services, lying in the mire Drinking the mash, with brain become alive, Making and marring clay at will; (_Caliban_, 11. 96-97.) to such a being not long endowed with a capacity for the realization of his own individuality, with the "sense of sense," the Greek appreciation of life is a sheer impossibility. By the mind capable of entering into sympathy with Homer, Terpander, Phidias, the joys of life are felt too keenly to be relinquished without a struggle, and that a bitter one. Death and the grave cast a chilling shadow over the brightness of the present. Before analysing the arguments contained in the reflections of Cleon, it may be well to inquire what were the influences to which the poet had been subjected, and which resulted in the condition of mind in which the messengers of Protus found him. The Greece in which Cleon lived was the Greece to which S. Paul addressed himself from the Areopagus, the character of which is sufficiently indicated by the circumstances leading to the assembly on that memorable occasion. The Athenians, we are told by the writer of the _Acts_, "spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing."[17] The age was then, it would appear, not one of action or of practical thought. All had been done in the past that could be done in the departments of artistic achievement, of poetry, of philosophy. Now _creative_ power would seem to have disappeared from amongst Greek thinkers, all that remained being the natural restlessness which ultimately succeeds satiety. Much had been accomplished in the past: What remained to the future? It is in accordance with this spirit of the age that Cleon writes to Protus: We of these latter days, with greater mind Than our forerunners, since more composite, Look not so great, beside their simple way, To a judge who only sees one way at once, One mind-point and no other at a time,-- Compares the small part of a man of us With some whole man of the heroic age, Great in his way--not ours, nor meant for ours. (ll. 64-71.) Hence the poet of modern times, though he has left the "epos on [the] hundred plates of gold," the property of the tyrant Protus, and the little popular song So sure to rise from every fishing-bark When, lights at prow, the seamen haul their net; (ll. 49, 50.)