public life, personally serving in more than one campaign. But public life palled upon him, as it palls on every ardent and enthusiastic character. His temper was too gentle and his principles too chivalrous for him to grapple with the unscrupulous party spirit of the times. Not even the charm of a friendship with Pericles, or the honour of a statesman's position, could console him for the loss of literary ease; and we can understand how gladly he must have left the restless and busy Athens for the peaceful and lovely scenery of Colonus. There, like Pope on his lawn at Twickenham, like Wordsworth in the solitude of Grasmere,—or, to use a more classical illustration, like Horace at his Sabine farm,—he was free to follow the bent of his genius, and to draw from nature his purest and most perfect picture of a Greek landscape.
Yet the scenes which he had left might well have attracted a more ambitious spirit
Athens was then teeming with all the exuberant life which marked the renaissance in modern times. Thought found its utterance in action, in the passion for war and in the restless spirit of enterprise, in all that many-sided energy which marked the Athenians—a people of whom their own historian speaks as "never quiet themselves, and never allowing others to be so."[1] Assuredly Sophocles was born under a lucky star; for his life was coeval with the greatness of his country, and he did not live to see the Long
- ↑ Thucydides, i. 70.
