Sophocles presents us with a wholly different type of genius. His conceptions, without being gigantic, are still great, and have a richness and roundness something like the form of woman. To him, as to Raffaelle, the world appeared pregnant on all sides with beauty. Yet, there was a vein of pensiveness in his fancy which, running through all his works, imparts to them a witchery independent of the amount of intellect displayed. He never, like Æschylus, transports us into the dim twilight of mythology amidst the nodding ruins of systems and creeds. However antique may be the subject which he treats, his invention gives it completeness, and he brings it out fresh, glossy, distinct, and beautiful as the creations of to-day. Æschylus carries us back to the past, Sophocles brings the past forward to us. By a vigorous exertion of genius he breathes life into things dead; melts away from about them by his warm touch the hoar of antiquity; fills up the outline; freshens the colours; converts them into contemporary existencies. All his sympathies, healthy and true, cling to the things around him: the religion, the form of polity, the climate, the soil of Attica, invested with the beauty which they assumed in his plastic vision, satisfied his desires. What he found not in realities he bestowed upon them. He idealised his contemporaries. His poetry is sunny as the Ægæan in spring, and a breeze as healthful and refreshing breathes over it. Like the nightingale, whose music he loved, it comes to us full of forgotten harmonies, re-awakening all the associations, all the delights, all the hopes and aspirations of youth. Sweet and musical, and replete with tenderness, are his marvellous chorusses. They burst upon the heart like the first note of the cuckoo[990] in the depths of a forest, curling round the mossy trunks of the meditative old trees upon the ear. Footnote 990: In Greece heard early in the spring.—Sibthorp, in Walp. Mem. i. 75.