“drill these words through thine ears with the quiet pace of thy mind,”[270] “breathe upon him the gale of blood and wither him with the reeking fire of thine entrails”.[271] Æschylus, indeed, like all poets, understood the majesty of sounding words, apart from their meaning. As Milton gloried in the use of magnificent proper names, so does the Athenian delight in thunderous elaboration. Therefore, not possessing the chastity of Sophocles, he is occasionally barbarous and noisy; Aristophanes[272] jests at his lyrics for their frequent exhibition of sound without sense. Oddly combined with this occasional savagery of phrase is the second quality of simplicity. Æschylus, so far as we know, was the creator of tragic diction. However greatly his successors improved upon him in flexibility, grace, and subtlety, it was he who first worked the mine of spoken language, strove to purify the ore, and forged the metal into an instrument of terror and delight. But even the creator needed practice in its use. He has a giant’s strength, and at times uses it like a giant, not like a gymnast. In his earlier work he seems muscle-bound, clumsy in the use of his new-found powers. He wields the pen as one more familiar with the spear; the warrior of Marathon does fierce battle with particles and phrases; he strains ideas to his breast and wrestles with elusive perfection; we seem to hear his panting when at last he erects as trophy some noble speech or miraculous lyric. This stiffness of execution persists faintly even in the _Oresteia_. The earlier tragedies, both in the characters and in the language, are rough-hewn, for all their glory. In the _Supplices_ this stark simplicity is actually the chief note. Here, more than elsewhere, the poet has a strange way of writing Greek at times as if it were some other language. The opening words of the Egyptian herald—σοῦσθε σοῦσθ’ ἐπὶ βᾶριν ὅπως ποδῶν[273]—can only be described as barbaric mouthing. Throughout this play the complete absence of lightness and speed, the crude beginnings of greatness, a certain bleak amplitude, are all typical of a new art-form not yet completely evolved. The poet, himself the beginner of a new epoch, fills us with an uncanny impression of persons standing on the threshold of history with little behind them but the Deluge. In the _Persæ_ and the _Septem_ there is the same instinct for spaciousness, but the canvas shows more colour and less of the bare sky, for we are now more conscious of background, the overthrow of Persia and the operations of human sin.