TALFOURD: "The great and distinguishing excellence of Sophocles
will be found in his excellent sense of the beautiful, and the
perfect harmony of all his powers. His conceptions are not on
so gigantic a scale as those of AEschylus; but in the circle which
he prescribes to himself to fill, not a place is left unadorned;
not a niche without its appropriate figure; not the smallest
ornament which is incomplete in the minutest graces. His judgment
seems absolutely perfect, for he never fails; he is always fully
master of himself and his subject; he knows the precise measure
of his own capacities; and while he never attempts a flight beyond
his reach, he never debases himself nor his art by anything beneath
him.

"Sophocles was undoubtedly the first philosophical poet of the
ancient world. With his pure taste for the graceful he perceived,
amidst the sensible forms around him, one universal spirit of
Jove pervading all things. Virtue and justice, to his mind, did
not appear the mere creatures of convenience, or the means of
gratifying the refined selfishness of man; he saw them, having
deep root in eternity, unchanging and imperishable as their divine
author. In a single stanza he has impressed this sentiment with
a plenitude of inspiration before which the philosophy of expediency
vanishes--a passage that has neither a parallel nor equal of its
kind, that we recollect, in the whole compass of heathen poetry,
and which may be rendered thus: 'Oh for a spotless purity of
action and of speech, according to those sublime laws of right
which have the heavens for their birthplace, and God alone for
their author--which the decays of mortal nature cannot vary,
nor time cover with oblivion, for the divinity is mighty within
them and waxes not old!'"