As champions smiting our foes to the ground.
And Artemis, too, with her torches flaring,
Gleams onward through Lycian uplands faring.”
Bacchus, also, the “god of the golden snood,” “lifts his pine-knot’s sparkle” and, roaming with his Mænads, seems to visualize for men the soul of Nature.
Aristophanes with his common-sense objectivity was averse to the sentimental and romantic in Euripides, which seemed to him effeminate. His love for nature was clear-eyed and Hellenic. His lyrics shine like a bird’s white wing in the sunlight. The self-invocation of the Clouds is alive with the radiance of the Attic atmosphere. A translation can only serve to illustrate the elements used in the description:—
CHORUS OF CLOUDS
“Come ever floating, O Clouds, anew,
Let us rise with the radiant dew
Of our nature undefiled
From father Ocean’s billows wild.