Leaves in the coppice nor the blades of meadow grass;
No cry at all of any wild things had you heard.”
The formal banns of the open wedlock of man and nature were declared in Euripides. Thereafter the treatment became more and more a matter of personal equation. In Plato’s dialogues, for example, the ethical element inevitably appears. In the famous scene beside the Ilissus, Socrates and young Phædrus talk through the heated hours beneath the shade of the wide-spreading plane tree, where the agnus castus is in full bloom, where water cool to the unsandalled feet flows by, and in the branches the cicadæ, “prophets of the Muses,” contribute of their wisdom.
The Anthology, stretched through the centuries of Greek literature, links the old and the newer, the antique reserve and the fainness of modern romanticism. One of the epigrams attributed to Plato will serve to indicate the emergence of the latter:—
“On the stars thou art gazing, my Star;
Would that the sky I might be,
For then from afar
With my manifold eyes I would gaze upon thee.”
Another seems like an artist’s preliminary sketch for the picture by the Ilissus, the deeper motive not yet painted in:—
“Sit thee down by this pine tree whose twigs without number