In yon precipice-face might I hide me from sorrow, And God, in his love, of the air make me free! Ah, to speed with the sea-gulls—alight on the morrow Where Eridanus mingles his waves with the sea! There for ever the sisters of Phaethon languish, For grief of his fate bowing hush’d o’er the stream; Like eyes in the gloaming, the tears of their anguish Up through the dark water as amber-drops gleam. Or far let me wing to the fäery beaches Where the Maids of the Sunset ’neath apple-boughs dance, And the Lord of the Waters his last purple reaches Hath closed to the mariner’s restless advance; Where from Atlas the sky arches down to the streaming Of the sea, and the spring of Eternity flows Where the mansion of Zeus on earth’s bosom is dreaming ’Mid life like a lily and bliss like a rose. Theseus himself expresses this sense of the fragile beauty of life in lines[472] which recall the unearthly charm of Sophocles:— ὄρνις γὰρ ὥς τις ἐκ χερῶν ἄφαντος εἶ, πήδημ’ ἐς Αἵδου κραιπνὸν ὁρμήσασά μοι. Even Artemis the unloving can tell of life’s charm surviving death itself in some wise, an immortality of beautiful remembrance.[473] Throughout, the poet has used all his power to invest the theme with loveliness of phrasing. Elsewhere, skilful as his writing is, he often gives us what is practically prose; the _Hippolytus_ is his nearest approach to the manner of Sophocles. Nor is the likeness confined to verbal expression. The theology is, or claims to be, the theology of Sophocles. The traditional Olympians are accepted as persons, with the powers and purposes which current belief attributed to them. This is the view which Sophocles accepts and expounds. Euripides who certainly did not accept it, here expounds it—in his own way and with deadly results. Many times Euripides questions the very existence of these deities, but now he sees fit to accept them for a moment, and depicts life as lived under such rulers. Men and women can feel and recreate the beauty of this world, but these gods time and again dash all into pitiful fragments. “The world is ruled by stupid fiends, who spend eternity thwarting one another. Do we dwell in a universe or a grinning chaos?”