The night and the day alike claimed the attention of the poets and the interchange of dusk and dawn appealed to the sculptor also. In the east gable of the Parthenon the horses of the Sun and of the Moon were at either end. Nature’s sleep is a favourite topic. Alcman’s description is unusual only for its detail:— “Sleep the peaks and mountain clefts; Forelands and the torrents’ rifts; All the creeping things are sleeping, Cherished in the black earth’s keeping; Mountain-ranging beast and bee; Fish in depths of the purple sea; Wide-winged birds their pinions droop— Sleep now all the feathered troop.” Goethe, in his well-known paraphrase,— “Ueber allen Gipfeln Ist Ruh,”— cannot refrain from adding the subjective conclusion of the whole matter:— “Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.” The great dramatists display an observation of the beauty of the external world not always sufficiently emphasized. In Æschylus an intense feeling is evident; none the less because it is subordinated to his theme or used to point, by way of contrast, some awe-inspiring or pathetic situation or some scene of blood. Clytemnestra describes how she murdered her husband. His spattering blood, she says,— “Keeps striking me with dusky drops of murd’rous dew, Aye, me rejoicing none the less than God’s sweet rain Makes glad the corn-land at the birth-pangs of the buds.” Comparisons, similes, and epithets drawn from the sea reappear continually in the warp and woof of Greek, and especially of Athenian, literature. Æschylus, like the rest, knew the sea in all its moods, terrible in storm, deceitful in calm, beautiful at all times and the pathway for commerce and for war. The returning herald in the “Agamemnon” rehearses the soldiers’ hard bivouac in summer and in winter:— “And should one tell of winter, dealing death to birds, What storms unbearable swept down from Ida’s snow, Or summer’s heat when, ruffled by no rippling breeze, Ocean slept waveless, on his midday couch laid prone.” With the first lines of “Prometheus Bound” we are carried far from the haunts of men:— “Unto this far horizon of earth’s plain we’ve come, This Scythian tract, this desert by man’s foot untrod.”