But he 'loved that beauty should go beautifully;' personal excellence of some kind was in his eyes essential; but on this he would fain shed radiance and majesty without end. His soul rejoiced in splendour—splendour of stately palace-halls where the columns were of marble and the entablature of wrought gold, splendour of temples of gods where the sculptor's waxing art had brought the very deities to dwell with man, splendour of the white-pillared cities that glittered across the Aegean and Sicilian seas, splendour of the holy Panhellenic games, of whirlwind chariots and the fiery grace of thoroughbreds, of the naked shapely limbs of the athlete man and boy. On this characteristic of Pindar it is needless to dwell, for there is scarcely an ode of those remaining which does not vividly impress it on our minds.
And it is more with him than a mere manner in poetical style. The same defect which we feel more or less present in all poets of antiquity—least of all perhaps in Virgil and Sophokles, but even in them somewhat—a certain want of widely sympathetic tenderness, this is unquestionably present in Pindar. What of this quality may have found expression in his lost poems, especially the Dirges, we can scarcely guess, but in his triumphal odes it hardly appears at all, unless in the touches of tender gracefulness into which he softens when speaking of the young. And we find this want in him mainly because objects of pity, such as especially elicit that quality of tenderness, are never or seldom present to Pindar's mind. He sees evil only in the shape of some moral baseness, falsehood, envy, arrogance, and the like, to be scathed in passing by the good man's scorn, or else in the shape of a dark mystery of pain, to be endured by those on whom it causelessly falls in a proud though undefiant silence. It was not for him, as for the great tragedians, to 'purge the mind by pity and fear,' for those passions had scarcely a place in his own mind or in the minds of those of whom he in his high phantasy would fain have had the world consist. And as in this point somewhat, so still more in others, does Pindar remind us, even more than might have been expected in a contemporary, of Aeschylus. The latter by virtue of his Athenian nurture as well as of his own greater natural gifts reveals to us a greater number
