Aye! there he lies,--the mighty one!
Death's hand is on him now;
And fearfully he puts his seal
Upon that haughty brow.
What boots it that his own proud name
In foreign lands has rung?
That orators his fame have spoke,
That bards his deeds have sung?
What boots it that the hills of Spain
Shook 'neath his lordly tread--
That with the blood of her best sons,
Her vallies' streams ran red?
That over Moscow's battlements,
His flag-folds he shook out--
That e'en the lofty pyramids
Rang with his charging shout?
He who subdu'd so many lands,
Must now from England crave
(Although she is his deadliest foe)
What man last wants--a grave!
For the Southern Literary Messenger.
MR. WHITE,--You have published at page 199 of your January number,
four outlandish-looking lines, with a hope that some one of your
numerous readers may not only be able to inform your correspondent who
furnished them, in what language they are written, but let him still
further into the secret by giving their meaning. Happening to know a
little of the Gaelic, I have no hesitation in saying that that is the
tongue in which they are written; and further, I think I have
succeeded, after a good deal of trouble, in discovering to a certainty
that they are a translation of the first stanza of Sappho's celebrated
Ode addressed "_To the Beloved Pair_," and commented upon at some
length by Longinus, in the tenth section of his De Sublimitate. The
stanza in question runs thus:
[For want of proper type we cannot give it in the Greek.--_Ed._]
Videtur mihi ille æqualis Diis
Esse Vir, qui oppositus tibi
Sedet, et prope te dulce loquentem audit
Et rides amabiliter.
Blest as the immortal Gods is he
The youth who fondly sits by thee,
And hears and sees thee all the while
Softly speak and sweetly smile.
An interesting critique upon the Ode, with the whole of Ambrose
Philips' spirited translation of it, is to be met with in the two
hundred and twenty-ninth number of the Spectator. Yours, &c.