Hence the universal fame and admiration of his writings. For, wherever a well-spring of delight exists, the world will discover it and have recourse to it for ever. The tragic poets who took up his mantle differed widely from him both in temper and character. The experiment of civilisation had been tried, and been the cause of less happiness than at the outset it seemed to promise. A spirit of dissatisfaction had consequently grown up in society, which, shaken by convulsions within and assaulted from without by storms, appeared to be fast resolving into its original elements. Upon the minds of the tragic poets there accordingly fell a gloomy shadow. They looked backwards and around them, and were saddened by the view of terrible pictures which the dark pencil of Fate was constantly filling up. The inexplicable influence of events upon the inner organisation of man had caused them too, and their contemporaries equally, to delight in gloom, in slaughter, in revenge, in exhibitions of suffering, analogous in many cases to what they beheld their countrymen inflict upon each other. Observe the creations of Æschylus:[989] in them, pregnant all with Miltonic haughtiness, energy, grandeur, we already discover symptoms of profound discontent with the character of actual existence and an invincible yearning towards the past. He seemed desirous to haunt the imaginations of his contemporaries with gigantic phantoms, quarried out of the wrecks of a vanished ethical system, in which such greatness found congeniality and sympathy. His ideas seemed to clothe themselves spontaneously in language of massive structure, like a Cyclopean wall, such as before or since no man ever used. He projected himself by the force of meditation into the heroic spheres, conversed there with mighty shades, acquired among them stern principles of action, of thought, of belief, of composition; and with these he sought to inspire the men of his own time. His object seems less to delight than to overawe, to persuade than to command. His ideas move along the highest arch of imagination which spans the universe from pole to pole, or rise out of a sea of darkness which they illuminate for a moment like lightning flashes in their passage. Footnote 989: The plays of this poet, like those of Shakespeare, were, in succeeding ages, altered for the stage—Quint. Instit. Orat. x. 1. The orator, Lycurgus, procured a decree, ordering the tragedies of the three poets to be copied, and statues to be erected in their honour.—Plut. Vit. x. Orat.