Hephæstus reluctant, compelled by Zeus’s order, rivets his kin-god, the Fire-bringer, to the desolate North Sea crag and withdraws leaving Prometheus in fetters to “wrestle down the myriad years of time.” The night shuts off the warmth and light, drawing over him her “star-embroidered robe,” and the fierce sun-god returns with blazing rays to “deflower his fair skin” bared of the white counterpane of “frost of early dawn.” Not until the emissaries of Zeus have departed does Prometheus deign to speak. Then he “communes with Nature.” He has no hope of help from God, none from the “helpless creatures of a day” whom he has helped. Alone with the forces of nature he utters that outcry unsurpassed in sublimity and in pathos:— “O upper air divine and winds on swift wings borne; Ye river-springs; innumerous laughter of the waves Of Ocean; thou, Earth, the mother of us all; And thou, all-seeing orb of the Sun—to you I cry: Behold me what I’m suffering, a god from gods!” Sophocles, too, lets Philoctetes, in his misery and loneliness on the rocky island of Lemnos, call out to the wild beasts and the landscape:— “Harbours and headlands; and ye mountain-ranging beasts, Companions mine; ye gnawed and hanging cliffs! Of this To you I cry aloud, for I have none save you— You ever present here—to whom to make my cry.” In his famous ode on the Attic Colonus he describes the natural beauty of his home with particularizing exactness. He has also a wealth of glittering epithet used for local colouring, for symbolism and personification. The contrast of day and night offers to him a welcome _mise-en-scène_. The sun’s rays are Apollo’s golden shafts and the moon’s light seems to filter through the trees as Artemis roams the uplands:— “O God of the light, from the woven gold Of the strings of thy bow, I am fain to behold Thy arrows invincible, showered around, As champions smiting our foes to the ground. And Artemis, too, with her torches flaring, Gleams onward through Lycian uplands faring.” Bacchus, also, the “god of the golden snood,” “lifts his pine-knot’s sparkle” and, roaming with his Mænads, seems to visualize for men the soul of Nature. Aristophanes with his common-sense objectivity was averse to the sentimental and romantic in Euripides, which seemed to him effeminate. His love for nature was clear-eyed and Hellenic. His lyrics shine like a bird’s white wing in the sunlight. The self-invocation of the Clouds is alive with the radiance of the Attic atmosphere. A translation can only serve to illustrate the elements used in the description:— CHORUS OF CLOUDS