The fact was that she read the Greeks as a woman of genius was sure to do; she passed by their majestic grace, amazed at their solemn profundity, and yet unaware that she was projecting into them a feeling, a sentimental outlook which they did not possess, attributing directly to them a deliberate power which was merely the effect of their unconscious, antique, and limited vision upon the emotional child of a later age. The strangest thing is that a woman of such complex and sensitive faculties should have given in her allegiance to such models. Never was there a writer in whom the best characteristics of the Greeks were more conspicuously absent. Their balance, their solidity, their calm, their gloomy acquiescence in the bitter side of life, have surely little in common with the passionate spirit that beat so wildly against the bars, and asked the stars and hills so eagerly for their secrets. Such a passage as the following, grand as is the central idea, is surely enough to show the utter incompatibility which existed between them: "I thought that had Æschylus lived after the incarnation and crucifixion of our Lord Jesus Christ, he might have turned, if not in moral and intellectual, yet in poetic faith, from the solitude of Caucasus to the deeper desertness of that crowded Jerusalem, where none had any pity,--from the faded white flower of a Titanic brow to the withered grass of a heart trampled on by its own beloved--from the glorying of him who gloried that he could not die, to the sublime meekness of the Taster of death for every man: from the taunt stung into being by the torment, to his more awful silence, when the agony stood dumb before the love." ... It was characteristic of a woman to bring the two personalities together, to dwell on what might have been; but this is not Greek.