Earth the most great and Heaven on high!
Father is he to man and god
And she, who taketh to her sod,
The cloud-flung rivers of the Sky.

And beareth offspring, men and grass,
and beasts in all their kinds, indeed,
Mother of All. And every seed
Earth-gendered back to Earth shall pass,
And back to Heaven the seeds of sky:
Seeing all things into all may range
And sundering, show new shapes of change,
But never that which is shall die.

(Euripides, fragment, trans. Gilbert Murray)

PS – I thought this was a totally obscure quote, which Timothy Findley uses as an epigraph in The Wars. But someone else likes it enough to name their blog for it.

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