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Hastening toward the Acropolis, he will first inspect the remains of the great theatre of Dionysus, so familiar to him as the place where, in the presence of all the people and many strangers, were acted the plays of his favorite poets, Eschylus and Sophocles, and where they won many prizes.
I had indeed my heroes of the former world, the Grecian antiquity, the high-minded Romans, in whose patriotism I glowed in dreams, the boundless fields of poetry with its gardens of wit and humour; and out of Sophocles and Eschylus, those dreamers of a world of spirits not understood, these seemed to me the most sublime objects that could ever have the power to shake my soul.
We sat down, Isaac Shingle doing the honours, confronted by Eschylus Stave, and all was right, and smooth, and pleasant, and in no way different from a party of well bred men in England.
However, they did not prove a sufficient counterpoise to his very square shoulders, which, obeying the laws of gravitation, destroyed his equilibrium, and threw him a somersault, when exit Eschylus Stave, esquire, head foremost, with a formidable rumble tumble and hurry scurry, down the back steps, his long shanks disappearing last, and clipping between us, and the bright moon like a pair of flails.
Ask the young noble, who has been to him as a father; and his response will be 'Anaxagoras. Ask the poor fisherman at the gates, who has been to him as a brother; and he will answer 'Anaxagoras. When the merry-hearted boys throng your doors to sing their welcome to Ornithae, inquire from whom they receive the kindest word and the readiest gift; and they will tell you, 'Anaxagoras. The Amphiaraus of Eschylus, says, 'I do not wish to appear to be a good man, but I wish to be one. Ask any of the poets, what living man most resembles Amphiaraus in this sentiment; and his reply will surely be, 'It is Anaxagoras.
Where are the faults of her poems, of which she had inquired? Yes, he will speak out, and he is now planning such a poem as she demands. But she it is, who has indeed spoken out in her verse? In his portfolio is a drama about a Moor of Othello's country, one Luria, with strange entanglings among his Florentines. See this, and this, how grandly it is said in the Greek of Eschylus!
And as I dwell on what I myself heard or saw of the mighty Westerner, and blend it with the history and literature of my age, and of what I can get of all ages, and conclude it with his death, it seems like some tragic play, superior to all else I know vaster and fierier and more convulsionary, for this America of ours, than Eschylus or Shakspere ever drew for Athens or for England.
As I sat on the top of my omnibus, and had a good view of him, the thought, dim and inchoate then, has since come out clear enough, that four sorts of genius, four mighty and primal hands, will be needed to the complete limning of this man's future portrait the eyes and brains and finger-touch of Plutarch and Eschylus and Michel Angelo, assisted by Rabelais.
Bryant pulsing the first interior verse-throbs of a mighty world bard of the river and the wood, ever conveying a taste of open air, with scents as from hayfields, grapes, birch-borders always lurkingly fond of threnodies beginning and ending his long career with chants of death, with here and there through all, poems, or passages of poems, touching the highest universal truths, enthusiasms, duties morals as grim and eternal, if not as stormy and fateful, as anything in Eschylus.
But it is more the grand curves of the cabbage that curl over cavernously like waves, and it is partly again that dreamy repetition, as of a pattern, that made two great poets, Eschylus and Shakespeare, use a word like "multitudinous" of the ocean.
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