recent poets—Keats,—has an ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn:’ it begins— ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness! Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian! who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy!’ No ancient poet would have dreamed of writing thus. There would have been no indistinct shadowy warmth, no breath of surrounding beauty: his delineation would have been cold, distinct, chiselled like the urn itself. The use which such a poet as Keats makes of ancient mythology is exactly similar. He owes his fame to the inexplicable art with which he has breathed a soft tint over the marble forms of gods and goddesses, enhancing their beauty without impairing their chasteness. The naked kind of imagination is not peculiar to a mythological age. The growth of civilisation, at least in Greece, rather increased than diminished the imaginative bareness of the poetical art. It seems to attain its height in Sophocles. If we examine any of his greater passages, a principal beauty is their reserved simplicity. A modern reader almost necessarily uses them as materials for fancy: we are too used to little circumstance to be able to do without it. Take the passage in which Œdipus contrasts the conduct of his sons with that of his daughters: ὦ πάντ’ ἐκείνω τοῖς ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ νόμοις φύσιν κατεικασθέντε καὶ βίου τροφάς. ἐκεῖ γὰρ οἱ μὲν ἄρσενες κατὰ στέγας θακοῦσιν ἱστουργοῦντες, αἱ δὲ σύννομοι τἄξω βίου τροφεῖα πορσύνουσ’ ἀεί. σφῷν δ’, ὦ τέκν’, οὓς μὲν εἰκὸς ἦν πονεῖν τάδε, κατ’ οἶκον οἰκουροῦσιν ὥστε παρθένοι, σφὼ δ’ ἀντ’ ἐκείνων τἀμὰ δυστήνου κακὰ ὑπερπονεῖτον. ἡ μέν ἐξ ὅτου νέας τροφῆς ἔληξε καὶ κατίσχυσεν δέμας, ἀεὶ μεθ’ ἡμῶν δύσμορος πλανωμένη γερονταγωγεῖ, πολλὰ μὲν κατ’ ἀγρίαν ὕλην ἄσιτος νηλίπους τ’ ἀλωμένη, πολλοῖσι δ’ ὄμβροις ἡλίου τε καύμασι μοχθοῦσα τλήμων, δεύτερ’ ἡγεῖται τὰ τῆς οἴκοι διαίτης, εἰ πατὴρ τροφὴν ἔχοι. What a contrast to the ravings of Lear! What a world of detail Shakespeare would have put into the passage! What talk of ‘sulphurous and thought-executing fires,’ ‘simulars of virtue,’ ‘pent-up guilts,’ and ‘the thick rotundity of the world!’ Decorum is the principal thing in Sophocles. The conception of Œdipus is not ‘Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With harlocks, hemlock, nettle, and cuckoo-flowers.’