For the writer of the _Hippolytus_, then, life is something profoundly sorrowful yet profoundly dear. Hippolytus’ address to Artemis on his return from the chase is compact of that mystic loveliness which fills remote glades with a visible presentment of the beauty of holiness:— For thee, my Queen, this garland have I twined Of blossoms from that meadow virginal, Where neither shepherd dares to graze his flock, Nor hath the scythe made entry: yet the bee Doth haunt the mead, that voyager of spring, ’Mid Nature’s shyest charm of stream and verdure. There may no base man enter; only he, Who, taught by instinct, uninstructed else, Hath taken Virtue for his star of life, May pluck the flow’rets of that pleasance pure. Come, Queen belovèd, for thy shining hair Accept this wreath from hands of innocence! To me alone of all mankind is given Converse to hold and company with thee, Hearing thy voice, although thy face be hid. To the end of life, as now, may I be thine![468] This passion for natural beauty as the background of emotional life recurs throughout. The Trœzenian women as they enter tell of their informant—not “some one talking near the place where men play draughts,” as in the _Medea_, but a woman in a picture:— Where waters leap, Waters that flow (men say) from the far-off western sea, Down the rock-face, And gush from the steep To a deep place Where pitchers may dip far down—thence hath come a message to me.[469] Phædra in her delirium sees visions of unfettered life “beneath the poplars, amid the deep grass,” she fancies herself cheering on the hunting hounds through the pine-glades, and yearns to feel in her grasp “the iron-pointed shaft”—words to which we come back with deeper pain when in almost the same language Hippolytus, now himself delirious, longs to let out his tortured life with a “two-edged spear”.[470] When she enters the house to seek death, the chorus pour forth their yearning for escape from the sin and sorrow of this life to romantic regions where all is grace and unstained peace:—[471]