The landscape must have been strikingly picturesque, with its white limestone cliffs, its dark grove sacred to "the gentle goddesses," and echoing with "all throats that gurgle sweet," with the pure clear stream of the Cephisus, never failing in the hottest summer, and watering this garden of Attica.
Whatever may have been his father's calling, Sophocles was himself a gentleman. "His natural gifts," says Lord Lytton, "were the rarest that nature bestows on man, genius and beauty." Body and mind were carefully trained under the best masters; and he received the complete liberal education of his age. We can imagine how the boy grew up to manhood, feeding his poetic fancy with those ancient founts of inspiration,—the adventures of the Argonauts or the "tale of Troy divine;" just as the genius of Spenser and Milton was nourished on the old romances of our country. We can imagine, too, how he must have been inspired with the eternal ideas of truth and beauty—wafted, as in Plato's State, "like gales of health blowing fresh from salubrious lands,"[1]—by the constant sight and presence of that noble city, robed in her "imperial mantle of architecture," adorned by the paintings of Panænus and by the sculpture of Phidias,—her streets crowded with strangers from all lands, and her harbours filled with the masts of a thousand triremes.
Sophocles made an early entrance on public life. At the age of sixteen his grace and beauty were such that he was selected from the youth of Attica to lead the
- ↑ Republ. iii. 401.
