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2. 'The style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the

style.' Notwithstanding the fascination which the word

'classical' exercises over us, we can hardly maintain that this

rule is observed in all the Greek poetry which has come down to

us. We cannot deny that the thought often exceeds the power of

lucid expression in Aeschylus and Pindar; or that rhetoric gets

the better of the thought in the Sophist-poet Euripides. Only

perhaps in Sophocles is there a perfect harmony of the two; in

him alone do we find a grace of language like the beauty of a

Greek statue, in which there is nothing to add or to take away;

at least this is true of single plays or of large portions of

them. The connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek

lyric poets is not unfrequently a tangled thread which in an age

before logic the poet was unable to draw out. Many thoughts and

feelings mingled in his mind, and he had no power of disengaging

or arranging them.