The third characteristic, picturesqueness, is the most obvious of all. The few instances of bombastic diction noted above are but the necessary failures of a supreme craftsman. Homer does not stay to embroider his language with metaphor, which belongs to a more reflective age; Pindar’s tropes are splendid and elaborate, a calculated jog to the attention. For Æschylus, metaphor seems the natural speech, unmetaphorical language a subtlety which requires practice. Danaus in his perplexity ponders “at the chess-board”;[274] when the assembly votes, “heaven bristles with right hands”;[275] an anxious heart “wears a black tunic”;[276] heaven “loads the scales”[277] to the detriment of Persia; the trumpet “blazes”;[278] misfortune “wells forth”;[279] Amphiaraus “reaps the deep furrow of his soul”;[280] “the sea laughs in ripples without number”;[281] the snow descends “with snowy wings”;[282] for an intrepid woman “hope treads not the halls of fear”;[283] “Fate the maker of swords is sharpening her weapon”;[284] Anarchy in the State is the “mixing of mud with water”.[285] The best example of all is the celebrated beacon-speech in the _Agamemnon_: “The flame is conceived as some mighty spirit.... It ‘vaults over the back of the sea with joy’; it ‘hands its message’ to the heights of Macistus; it ‘leaps across’ the plain of Asopus, and ‘urges on’ the watchmen; its ‘mighty beard of fire’ streams across the Saronic gulf, as it rushes along from peak to peak, until finally it ‘swoops down’ upon the palace of the Atreidæ.”[286]