ent.
She claims no equality with him, the consummate creator; but only, as a
woman, the love of all things lovable with which to meet him who has
degraded Comedy. She appeals to the high poet in the man, and finally
bids him honour the deep humanity in Euripides. To prove it, and to win
his accord, she reads the _Herakles_, the last of Euripides.

It is this long night of talk which Balaustion dictates to Euthycles as
she is sailing, day after day, from Athens back to Rhodes. The aspect of
sea and sky, as they sail, is kept before us, for Balaustion uses its
changes as illustrations, and the clear descriptions tell, even more
fully than before, how quick this woman was to observe natural beauty
and to correlate it with humanity. Here is one example. In order to
describe a change in the temper of Aristophanes from wild license to
momentary gravity, Balaustion seizes on a cloud-incident of the
voyage--Euthycles, she cries,

... "o'er the boat side, quick, what change,
Watch--in the water! But a second since,
It laughed a ripply spread of sun and sea,
Ray fused with wave, to never disunite.
Now, sudden, all the surface hard and black,
Lies a quenched light, dead motion: what the cause?
Look up, and lo, the menace of a cloud
Has solemnised the sparkling, spoiled the sport!
Just so, some overshadow, some new care
Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face."

Her feeling for nature is as strong us her feeling for man, and both are
woven together.

All her powers have now ripened, and the last touch has been given to
them by her ideal sorrow for Athens, the country of her soul, where high
intelligence and imagination had created worlds. She leaves it now,
ruined and degraded, and the passionate outbreak of her patriotic sorrow
with which the poem opens lifts the character and imagination of
Balaustion into spiritual splendour. Athens, "hearted in her heart," has
perished ignobly. Not so, she thinks, ought this beauty of the world to
have died, its sea-walls razed to the ground to the fluting and singing
of harlots; but in some vast overwhelming of natural energies--in the
embrace of fire to join the gods; or in a sundering of the earth, when
the Acropolis should have sunken entire and risen in Hades to console
the ghosts with beauty; or in the multitudinous over-swarming of ocean.
This she could have borne, but, thinking of what has been, of the misery
and disgrace, "Oh," she c