“Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.”
The great dramatists display an observation of the beauty of the external world not always sufficiently emphasized. In Æschylus an intense feeling is evident; none the less because it is subordinated to his theme or used to point, by way of contrast, some awe-inspiring or pathetic situation or some scene of blood. Clytemnestra describes how she murdered her husband. His spattering blood, she says,—
“Keeps striking me with dusky drops of murd’rous dew,
Aye, me rejoicing none the less than God’s sweet rain
Makes glad the corn-land at the birth-pangs of the buds.”
Comparisons, similes, and epithets drawn from the sea reappear continually in the warp and woof of Greek, and especially of Athenian, literature. Æschylus, like the rest, knew the sea in all its moods, terrible in storm, deceitful in calm, beautiful at all times and the pathway for commerce and for war. The returning herald in the “Agamemnon” rehearses the soldiers’ hard bivouac in summer and in winter:—
“And should one tell of winter, dealing death to birds,
What storms unbearable swept down from Ida’s snow,