“Come ever floating, O Clouds, anew, Let us rise with the radiant dew Of our nature undefiled From father Ocean’s billows wild. The tree-fringed peak Of hill upon lofty hill let us seek That we may look on the cliffs far-seen, And the sacred land’s water that lends its green To the fruits, and the whispering rush of the rivers divine And the clamorous roar of the dashing brine. For Ether’s eye is flashing his light Untired by glare as of marble bright.” The “meteor eyes” of the sun gaze “sanguine” and unblinking upon the cloud-palisades, glaring bright as the marble of Mount Pentelicus. Readers of the Greek will recognize here and there how an Aristophanic epithet or thought has been precipitated and recombined by Shelley into new and radiant shapes that drift through his own cloud-land,—“I change but I cannot die!” Aristophanes’s observation of nature is varied and exact. He had nothing but ridicule for the pale student within doors, and only a man who kept up an intimacy with “the open road” could have made the naturalistic painting in the “Peace” of the serenity of country life:— “We miss the life of days gone by, the pressed fruit-cakes, the figs, the myrtles and the sweet new wine, the olive trees, the violet bed beside the well.” Euripides in his attitude toward nature has all the qualities of the other tragedians except sublimity, to which he more rarely attains. Many qualities are much more conspicuous. His range of colour is wider. His allusions to rivers and to the plant and animal world are more detailed. Picturesque scenes and setting delight him. Beyond all this the reflection in nature of human emotion, occasional in his predecessors, plays in his verse almost a leading part. Modern romanticism, in short, is no longer exceptional. Hippolytus, the acolyte of Artemis, and his attendants address the virgin goddess who ranges the woods and mountains and who, as Æschylus says, is “kindly unto all the young things suckled at the breast of wild-wood roaming beasts.” The “modern” element in the original loses nothing in this paraphrase by Mallock:— “Hail, O most pure, most perfect, loveliest one! Lo, in my hand I bear, Woven for the circling of thy long gold hair, Culled leaves and flowers, from places which the sun The Spring long shines upon, Where never shepherd hath driven flock to graze, Nor any grass is mown; But there sound throughout the sunny, sweet warm days, ’Mid the green holy place The wild bee’s wings alone.” In one of the despairing chorals of the “Trojan Women” the personification of nature blends with the spirit of mythology. The name of Tithonus, easily supplied by a Greek hearer, is inserted for English readers in Gilbert Murray’s beautiful paraphrase:—