His world is the topsy-turvy world. When, in the _Peace_, Trygaios saddles a stinking carrion-beetle and on it, as his Pegasus, mounts through the clouds to the dwellings of the Gods, or when he drags Peace up by a fathom-long rope from the deep well into which she has been thrown by War, these proceedings are represented as if there were nothing in the least unusual or impossible about them; no explanation is offered; and we are compelled to believe in them. When, in _The Birds_, we hear two silly fellows, who are posing as philosophers, disclose their crazy plans for building a city in the clouds, it all sounds very mad, and when we see the Birds receive these men with reverence, we do not conceive any higher opinion of their intelligence, we are only struck by the comicality of the birds being so stupid as to put their trust in them. But when we hear that the city is actually built, that fortune has attended the enterprise and that it has been crowned with success, we feel that the world set before us here is not our own everyday world, but one with whose laws things are compatible which are contrary to the laws of ours. This new world is purely fantastic, in so far as it is antagonistic to the laws of probability and of nature. It is a world in which madness triumphs, and the poet pretends that this is as it should be. Not till the spectator begins to wonder _where_ this topsy-turvy world can be, _where_ such things happen, _where_ political effrontery on such a gigantic scale, far from being confounded and put to shame, wins confidence and is rewarded--not till then is he led back to reality, to the recognition in this world of his own world, his own home, Athens. Three of the Aristophanic comedies in our possession, _The Birds, The Frogs_, and _Peace_, do not pass, or pass only in part, on earth; they are meteoric or underground dramas. And it is in these only that Gods are represented, and then merely that they may be rated, ridiculed, or beaten. In the world of reality they do not reveal themselves; for it is only in the world of fancy that they are believed in. Heine, the modern poet, dares not ask his readers to follow him into the same sort of supernatural world; and yet he cannot dispense with the supernatural; hence that constantly recurring use and abuse of dreams, for which hardly any parallel is to be found among other modern poets. Within the frame-work, as it were, of the dream, he dares to be extraordinary, to be Aristophanic. As has been already remarked, he resembles Aristophanes in the depth of his shamelessness and in the height of his lyric flight.