The panting herds repose:
Yet hark! how through the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!
The insect-youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honeyed spring,
And float amid the liquid noon;
Some lightly o'er the current skim,
Some show their gayly gilded trim
Quick-glancing to the sun.
To Contemplation's sober eye
Such is the race of Man;
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the Busy and the Gay
But flutter through life's little day,
In Fortune's varying colors drest;
Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chilled by Age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.
Methinks I hear, in accents low,
The sportive kind reply:
Poor moralist! and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display:
On hasty wings thy youth is flown;
Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone--
We frolic while 'tis May.
ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE
Ye distant spires, ye antique towers,
That crown the watery glade,
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's holy shade;
And ye, that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights th' expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way!
Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood strayed,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
Say, Father Thames,--for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race
Disporting on thy margent green,
The paths of pleasure trace,--
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthrall?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?
While some, on earnest business bent,
Their murmuring labors ply
'Gainst graver hours that bring constraint
To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry,
Still as they run they look behind,
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.
Gay hope is theirs, by fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possest;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast:
Theirs buxom health, of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever new,
And lively cheer, of vigor born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly th' approach of morn.
Alas! regardless of their doom,
The little victims play;
No sense have they of ills to come,
No care beyond to-day:
Yet see, how all around them wait
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah, show them where in ambush stand,
To seize their prey, the murtherous band!
Ah! tell them they are men!
These shall the fury Passions tear,
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,
And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy, with rankling tooth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart;
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged comfortless Despair,
And Sorrow's piercing dart.
Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning Infamy.
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness's altered eye,
That mocks the tear it forced to flow;
And keen Remorse with blood defiled,
And moody Madness laughing wild
Amid severest woe.
Lo! in the vale of years beneath
A grisly troop are seen,--
The painful family of Death,
More hideous than their queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every laboring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage:
Lo! Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.
To each his sufferings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
Th' unfeeling for his own.
Yet, ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their Paradise.
No more: where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.
THE BARD
A PINDARIC ODE
"Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait!
Though fanned by Conquest's crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm, nor hauberk's twisted mail,
Nor e'en thy virtues, Tyrant, shall avail
To save thy secret soul from nightly fears,--
From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!"
Such were the sounds that o'er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scattered wild dismay,
As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side
He wound with toilsome march his long array.
Stout Glo'ster stood aghast in speechless trance;
"To arms!" cried Mortimer, and couched his quivering lance.
On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er cold Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the poet stood;
(Loose his beard, and hoary hair
Streamed, like a meteor, to the troubled air;)
And with a master's hand and prophet's fire,
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre:
"Hark, how each giant oak, and desert cave,
Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!
O'er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave,
Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe;
Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal day,
To high-born Hoel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay.
"Cold is Cadwallo's tongue,
That hushed the stormy main;
Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed;
Mountains, ye mourn in vain
Modred, whose magic song
Made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topt head.
On dreary Arvon's shore they lie,
Smeared with gore, and ghastly pale:
Far, far aloof the affrighted ravens sail;
The famished eagle screams, and passes by.
Dear lost companions of my tuneful art,
Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,
Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart,
Ye died amidst your dying country's cries.
No more I weep: they do not sleep;
On yonder cliffs, a grisly band,
I see them sit; they linger yet,
Avengers of their native land;
With me in dreadful harmony they join,
And weave with bloody hands the tissue of thy line.
"Weave the warp, and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of Edward's race;
Give ample room, and verge enough,
The characters of hell to trace;
Mark the year, and mark the night,
When Severn shall re-echo with affright
The shrieks of death, through Berkley's roof that ring,
Shrieks of an agonizing King!
She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,
That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate,
From thee be born, who o'er thy country hangs
The scourge of Heaven. What terrors round him wait!
Amazement in his van, with Flight combined,
And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind.
"Mighty victor, mighty lord!
Low on his funeral couch he lies!
No pitying heart, no eye, afford
A tear to grace his obsequies.
Is the sable warrior fled?
Thy son is gone. He rests among the dead.
The swarm, that in thy noontide beam were born?
Gone to salute the rising morn.
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows,
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes:
Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey.
"Fill high the sparkling bowl!
The rich repast prepare!
Reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast:
Close by the regal chair
Fell Thirst and Famine scowl
A baleful smile upon their baffled guest.
Heard ye the din of battle bray,
Lance to lance, and horse to horse?
Long years of havoc urge their destined course,
And through the kindred squadrons mow their way.
Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame,
With many a foul and midnight murder fed,
Revere his consort's faith, his father's fame,
And spare the meek usurper's holy head.
Above, below, the rose of snow,
Twined with her blushing foe, we spread:
The bristled boar in infant-gore
Wallows beneath the thorny shade.
Now, brothers, bending o'er the accursed loom,
Stamp we our vengeance deep, and ratify his doom.
"Edward, lo! to sudden fate
(Weave we the woof. The thread is spun.)
Half of thy heart we consecrate.
(The web is wove. The work is done.)
Stay, oh stay! nor thus forlorn
Leave me unblessed, unpitied, here to mourn:
In yon bright track that fires the western skies,
They melt, they vanish from my eyes.
But oh! what solemn scenes on Snowdon's height
Descending slow their glittering skirts unroll?
Visions of glory, spare my aching sight!
Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!
No more our long-lost Arthur we bewail.
All hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia's issue, hail!
"Girt with many a baron bold,
Sublime their starry fronts they rear;
And gorgeous dames and statesmen old
In bearded majesty appear.
In the midst a form divine!
Her eye proclaims her of the Briton line;
Her lion port, her awe-commanding face,
Attempered sweet to virgin grace.
What strings symphonious tremble in the air;
What strains of vocal transport round her play!
Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear!
They breathe a soul to animate thy clay.
Bright Rapture calls, and soaring as she sings,
Waves in the eye of heaven her many-colored wings.
"The verse adorn again
Fierce war, and faithful love,
And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.
In buskined measures move
Pale Grief, and pleasing Pain,
With Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast.
A voice, as of the cherub choir,
Gales from blooming Eden bear;
And distant warblings lessen on my ear,
That lost in long futurity expire.
Fond impious man, thinkest thou yon sanguine cloud,
Raised by thy breath, has quenched the orb of day?
To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,
And warms the nations with redoubled ray.
Enough for me; with joy I see
The different doom our fates assign;
Be thine despair, and sceptred care;
To triumph and to die are mine."
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.
THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS
The greater monuments of Greece all men know, the incomparable peaks of
the chain; and the chain lasted seventeen hundred years, nor ever sank
to the dead level about. The steadfast sight of these great Greek
originals warps and dwarfs our conception of Greek life. We behold the
Parthenon; we forget that each village shrine had its sense of
proportion and subtle curve. The Venus of Melos we remember, and the
Victory is poised forever on its cliff; but Tanagra figurines tell as
much, and reveal more, of Greek life. Nor is it otherwise in letters.
The great names all know. For a brief span they stood close together,
and the father who heard AEschylus might have told his experience to his
long-lived son who read Aristotle, while between the two stood all the
greatest genius that makes Greece Greek,--save only Homer. So brief was
the noonday,--and it is at high noon, and high noon only, that men have
agreed to take the sun; but this uplift was gained in the ascent of nigh
two hundred years from the first written Greek literature that still
lives. The descent, to the last of the Greek verse which still remained
poetry, ran through thirteen centuries. Over all this prodigious span of
fifteen hundred years stretches the Greek Anthology, a collection of
4,063 short Greek poems, two to eight lines long for the most part,
collected and re-collected through more than a thousand years. The first
of these poets, Mimnermus, was the contemporary of Jeremiah, and dwelt
in cities that shuddered over tidings of Babylonian invasion. The last,
Cometas, was the contemporary of Edward the Confessor, and dreaded
Seljuk and Turk.
As the epic impulse faded, and before Greek genius for tragedy rose, the
same race and dialect which had given epic narrative the proud, full
verse that filled like a sail to zephyr and to storm alike, devised the
elegiac couplet. With its opening even flow, its swifter rush in the
second line, and its abrupt pause, it was a medium in which not
narrative but man spoke, whether personal in passion, or impersonal in
the dedication of a statue, or in epitaph. This verse had conventions as
rigorous and restrained as the sonnet, and was briefer. It served as
well for the epitaph of Thermopylae as for the cradle-bier of a child,
dead new-born; and lent itself as gracefully to the gift of a bunch of
roses as it swelled with some sonorous blast of patriotism. It could
sharpen to a gibe, or sink to a wail at untoward fate. Through a period
twice as long as the life of English letters, these short poems set
forth the vision of life, the ways and works of men, the love and death
of mortals. These lines of weight, of moment, always of grace and often
of inspiration, stood on milestones; they graced the base of statues;
they were inscribed on tombs; they stood over doorways; they were
painted on vases. The rustic shrines held them, and on the front of the
great temple they were borne. In this form, friend wrote to friend and
lover to lover. Four or five of the best express the emotion of the
passing Greek traveler at the statue of Memnon on the Nile. The quality
of verse that fills the inn album to-day we all know; but Greek life was
so compact of form and thought that even this unknown traveler's verse,
scrawled with a stylus, still thrills, still rings, as the statue still
sounds its ancient note.
In this long succession of short poems is delineated the Greek
character, not of Athens but of the whole circle of the Mediterranean.
The sphered life of the race is in its subjects. Each great Greek
victory has its epigrams. In them, statues have an immortal life denied
to marble and to bronze. The critical admiration of the Hellene for his
great men of letters stands recorded here; his early love for the heroes
of his brief-lived freedom, and his sedulous flattery of the Roman lords
of his slavery. Here too is his domestic life, its joy and its sorrow.
In this epigram, the maid dedicates her dolls to Artemis; and in that,
the mother, mother and priestess both, lays down a life overflowing in
good deeds and fruited with honorable offspring. The splendid side of
Greek life is painted elsewhere. Here is its homely simplicity. The
fisher again spreads his nets and the sailor his peaked lateen sail. The
hunter sets his snares and tracks his game in the light snow. The caged
partridge stretches its weary wings in its cage, and the cat has for it
a modern appetite. Men gibe and jest. They see how hollow life is, and
also how truth rings true. Love is here, sacred and revered, in forms
pure and holy; and not less, that foul pool decked with beauty in which
Greek manhood lost its masculine virtue.
Half a century before Christ, when Greek life overspread the eastern
Mediterranean, and in every market-place Greek was the tongue of trade,
of learning, and of gentle breeding, Greek letters grew conscious of its
own riches. For six centuries and more, or as long as separates us from
Chaucer, men had been writing these brief epigrams. The first had the
brevity of Simonides, the next Alexandrian luxuriance. Many were carved
by those who wrote much; more by those who composed but two or three. In
Syrian Gadara there dwelt a Greek, Meleager, whose poetry is the very
flower of fervent Greek verse. Yet so near did he live to the great
change which was to overturn the gods he loved, and substitute morality
for beauty as the mainspring of life, that some who knew him must also,
a brief span of years later, have known Jesus the Christ. Meleager was
the first who gathered Greek epigrams in an Anthology, prefacing it with
such apt critical utterance as has been the despair of all critics
called since to weigh verse in ruder scales and with a poise less
perfect. He had the wide round of the best of Greek to pick from, and he
chose with unerring taste. To his collection Philippus of Thessalonica,
working when Paul was preaching in Jason's house, added the work of the
Roman period, the fourth development of the epigram. Other collections
between have perished, one in the third or Byzantine period, in which
this verse had a renaissance under Justinian. In the tenth century a
Byzantine scholar, Constantinos Cephalas, rearranged his predecessors'
collections,--Meleager's included,--and brought together the largest
number which has come down to us. The collection is known to-day as the
'Palatine Anthology,' from the library which long owned it. His work was
in the last flare of life in the Lower Empire, when Greek heroism, for
the last time, stemmed the Moslem tide and gave Eastern Europe
breathing-space. When his successor Maximus Planudes, of the century of
Petrarch,--monk, diplomat, theologian, and phrase-maker,--addressed
himself to the last collection made, the shadow of new Italy lay over
Greek life, and the Galilean had recast the minds of men. He excluded
much that Greeks, from Meleager to Cephalas, had freely admitted, and
which modern lovers of the Anthology would be willing to see left out of
all copies but their own. The collection of Planudes long remained alone
known (first edition Florence, 1594). That of Cephalas survived in a
single manuscript of varied fortune, seen in 1606 by Salmasius at
eighteen,--happy boy, and happy manuscript!--lost to learning for a
century and a half in the Vatican, published by Brunck, 1776, and
finally edited by Frederic Jacobs, 1794-1803, five volumes of text and
three of comment, usually bound in eight. The text has been republished
by Tauchnitz, and the whole work has its most convenient and familiar
form for scholars in the edition of both the collections of Planudes and
Cephalas, with epigrams from all other sources prepared by Frederic
Duebner for Didot's 'Bibliotheca Scriptorum Graecorum,' 1864-1872, three
volumes. The Anthology as a whole has no adequate English translation.
About one-third of the poems have a prose translation by George Burges
in the 'Greek Anthology,' 1832, of Bohn's series, with versions in verse
by many hands.
The first English translation of selections appeared anonymously, 1791.
Others have succeeded: Robert Bland and John Herman Merivale, 1806;
Robert Bland, 1813; Richard Garnett, 1864; Sir Edwin Arnold, 1869; John
Addington Symonds, 1873; J.W. Mackail, 1890; Lilla Cabot Perry, 1891. A
collection of selected translations edited by Graham R. Tomson was
published in 1889. Of these partial versions, the only one which
approaches the incommunicable charm of the original is Mr. Mackail's, an
incomparable translation. His versions are freely used in the selections
which follow. All the metrical versions, except those by Mrs. Perry, are
from Miss Tomson's collection. But no translation equals the sanity, the
brevity, the clarity of the Greek original, qualities which have made
these epigrams consummate models of style to the modern world. In all
the round of literature, the only exact analogue of the Greek epigram is
the Japanese "ode," with its thirty syllables, its single idea, and its
constant use of all classes as an universal medium of familiar poetic
expression. Of like nature, used alike for epigraph, epitaph, and
familiar personal expression, is the rhymed Arabic Makotta, brief poems
written in one form for eighteen hundred years, and still written.
[Signature: TALCOTT WILLIAMS]
ON THE ATHENIAN DEAD AT PLATAEA
SIMONIDES (556-467 B.C.)
If to die nobly is the chief part of excellence, to us out of all men
Fortune gave this lot; for hastening to set a crown of freedom on
Greece, we lie possessed of praise that grows not old.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
ON THE LACEDAEMONIAN DEAD AT PLATAEA
SIMONIDES
These men, having set a crown of imperishable glory on their own land,
were folded in the dark clouds of death; yet being dead they have not
died, since from on high their excellence raises them gloriously out of
the house of Hades.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
ON A SLEEPING SATYR
PLATO (429-347 B. C.)
This satyr Diodorus engraved not, but laid to rest; your touch will wake
him; the silver is asleep.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
A POET'S EPITAPH
SIMMIAS OF THEBES (405 B.C.)
Quietly, o'er the tomb of Sophocles,
Quietly, ivy, creep with tendrils green;
And roses, ope your petals everywhere,
While dewy shoots of grape-vine peep between,
Upon the wise and honeyed poet's grave,
Whom Muse and Grace their richest treasures gave.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
WORSHIP IN SPRING
THEAETETUS (Fourth Century B. C.)
Now at her fruitful birth-tide the fair green field flowers out in
blowing roses; now on the boughs of the colonnaded cypresses the cicala,
mad with music, lulls the binder of sheaves; and the careful mother
swallow, having finished houses under the eaves, gives harborage to her
brood in the mud-plastered cells; and the sea slumbers, with
zephyr-wooing calm spread clear over the broad ship-tracks, not breaking
in squalls on the stemposts, not vomiting foam upon the beaches. O
sailor, burn by the altars the glittering round of a mullet, or a
cuttle-fish, or a vocal scarus, to Priapus, ruler of ocean and giver of
anchorage; and so go fearlessly on thy seafaring to the bounds of the
Ionian Sea.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
SPRING ON THE COAST
LEONIDAS OF TARENTUM (Third Century B. C.)
Now is the season of sailing; for already the chattering swallow is
come, and the gracious west wind; the meadows flower, and the sea,
tossed up with waves and rough blasts, has sunk to silence. Weigh thine
anchors and unloose thine hawsers, O mariner, and sail with all thy
canvas set: this I, Priapus of the harbor, bid thee, O man, that thou
mayest set forth to all thy trafficking.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
A YOUNG HERO'S EPITAPH.
DIOSCORIDES (Third Century B. C.)
Home to Petana comes Thrasybulus lifeless on his shield, seven Argive
wounds before. His bleeding boy the father Tynnichos lays on the pyre,
to say:--"Let your wounds weep. Tearless I bury you, my boy--mine and my
country's."
Translation of Talcott Williams.
LOVE
POSIDIPPUS (Third Century B. C.)
Jar of Athens, drip the dewy juice of wine, drip, let the feast to which
all bring their share be wetted as with dew; be silenced the swan-sage
Zeno, and the Muse of Cleanthes, and let bitter-sweet Love be our
concern.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
SORROW'S BARREN GRAVE
HERACLEITUS (Third Century B. C.)
Keep off, keep off thy hand, O husbandman,
Nor through this grave's calm dust thy plowshare drive;
These very sods have once been mourned upon,
And on such ground no crop will ever thrive,
Nor corn spring up with green and feathery ears,
From earth that has been watered by such tears.
Translation of Alma Strettell.
TO A COY MAIDEN
ASCLEPIADES (286 B.C.)
Believe me love, it is not good
To hoard a mortal maidenhood;
In Hades thou wilt never find,
Maiden, a lover to thy mind;
Love's for the living! presently
Ashes and dust in death are we!
Translation of Andrew Lang.
THE EMPTIED QUIVER
MNESALCUS (Second Century B.C.)
This bending bow and emptied quiver, Promachus hangs as a gift to thee,
Phoebus. The swift shafts men's hearts hold, whom they called to death
in the battle's rout.
Translation of Talcott Williams.
THE TALE OF TROY
ALPHEUS (First Century B.C.)
Still we hear the wail of Andromache, still we see all Troy toppling
from her foundations, and the battling Ajax, and Hector, bound to the
horses, dragged under the city's crown of towers,--through the Muse of
Maeonides, the poet with whom no one country adorns herself as her own,
but the zones of both worlds.
Translation of J.W. Mackail.
HEAVEN HATH ITS STARS
MARCUS ARGENTARIUS (First Century B.C.)
Feasting, I watch with westward-looking eye
The flashing constellations' pageantry,
Solemn and splendid; then anon I wreathe
My hair, and warbling to my harp I breathe
My full heart forth, and know the heavens look down
Pleased, for they also have their Lyre and Crown.
Translation of Richard Garnett.
PAN OF THE SEA-CLIFF
ARCHIAS (First Century B.C.)
Me, Pan, the fishermen placed upon this holy cliff,--Pan of the
sea-shore, the watcher here over the fair anchorages of the harbor: and
I take care now of the baskets and again of the trawlers off this shore.
But sail thou by, O stranger, and in requital of this good service of
theirs I will send behind thee a gentle south wind.