FOOTNOTES:
[163] He mutilated and, so to speak, castrated this book quite as much as he arranged its contents, by withdrawing the more lascivious epigrams according to his own boast.
[164] Paris, 1864-1872. The translations quoted by me are taken principally from the collections of Wellesley (Anthologia Polyglotta) and Burgess (Bohn's Series), and from the Miscellanies of the late J. A. Symonds, M.D. The versions contributed by myself have no signature.
[165] I have spoken of these compositions of Simonides as though they all belonged to the dedicatory epigrams. A large number of them are, however, incorporated among the epitaphs proper.
To those of Lacedæmon, stranger, tell,
That, as their laws commanded, here we fell.
John Sterling.
There is no very good translation of this couplet. The difficulty lies in the word ῥήμασι. Is this equivalent to ῥήτραις, as Cicero, who renders it by legibus, seems to think? Or is it the same as orders?
What time the Greeks with might and warlike deed,
Sustained by courage in their hour of need,
Drove forth the Persians, they to Zeus that frees
This altar built, the free fair pride of Greece.
They told me, Heracleitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
Would that swift ships had never been; for so
We ne'er had wept for Sopolis: but he
Dead on the waves now drifts; while we must go
Past a void tomb, a mere name's mockery.
Here lapped in hallowed slumber Saon lies,
Asleep, not dead; a good man never dies.
J. A. Symonds, M.D.
Thou wert the morning star among the living,
Ere thy fair light had fled;
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus giving
New splendor to the dead.
Shelley.
We who once left the Ægean's deep-voiced shore,
Lie 'neath Ecbatana's champaign, where we fell.
Farewell Eretria, thou famed land of yore,
And neighbor Athens, and loved sea, farewell.
Pillars of death, carved sirens, tearful urns,
In whose sad keeping my poor dust is laid,
To him, who near my tomb his footsteps turns,
Stranger or Greek, bid hail; and say a maid
Rests in her bloom below; her sire the name
Of Baucis gave; her birth and lineage high;
And say her bosom friend Erinna came
And on this tomb engraved her elegy.
Elton.
This is the dust of Timas, whom unwed
Persephone locked in her darksome bed:
For her the maids who were her fellows shore
Their curls and to her tomb this tribute bore.
Sleep, poor youth, sleep in peace,
Relieved from love and mortal care;
Merciless heaven! why didst thou show me light
For so few years and speedy in their flight?
Was it to vex by my untimely death
With tears and wailings her who gave me breath?
Who bore me, and who reared me, and who wrought
More for my youth with many a careful thought
Than my dead sire: he left me in his hall
An orphan babe: 'twas she alone did all.
My joy it was beneath grave men of laws,
Just pleas to urge and win approved applause;
But from my cheek she never plucked the flower
Of charming youth, nor dressed my bridal bower,
Nor sang my marriage hymn, nor saw, ah me!
My offspring shoot upon our ancient tree,
That now is withered. Even in the tomb
I wail Politta's woe, the gloom on gloom
That swells her grief for Phronton; since a boy
In vain she bore, his country's empty joy.
Thou art not dead, my Prote! thou art flown
To a far country better than our own;
Thy home is now an island of the blest;
There 'mid Elysian meadows take thy rest:
Or lightly trip along the flowery glade,
Rich with the asphodels that never fade!
Nor pain, nor cold, nor toil shall vex thee more,
Nor thirst, nor hunger on that happy shore;
Nor longings vain (now that blest life is won)
For such poor days as mortals here drag on;
To thee for aye a blameless life is given
In the pure light of ever-present Heaven.
J. A. Symonds, M.D.
Home to their stalls at eve the oxen came
Down from the mountain through the snow-wreaths deep;
But ah! Therimachus sleeps the long sleep
'Neath yonder oak, lulled by the levin-flame.
She who was once but in her flesh a slave
Hath for her flesh found freedom in the grave.
Hades is stern; but when you died, he said,
Smiling, "Be jester still among the dead."
Know well that thou art mortal: therefore raise
Thy spirit high with long luxurious days.
When thou art dead, thou hast no pleasure then.
I too am earth, who was a king of men
O'er Nineveh. My banquets and my lust
And love-delights are mine e'en in the dust;
But all those great and glorious things are flown.
True doctrine for man's life is this alone.
When homeward cowering from the fight you ran
Without or sword or shield, a naked man,
Your mother then, Demetrius, through your side
Plunged her blood-drinking spear, nor wept, but cried:
Die; let not Sparta bear the blame; but she
Sinned not, if cowards drew their life from me!
Travelling to Ephyre, by the road-side
The tomb and name of Lais I espied:
I wept and said: "Hail, queen, the fame of thee,
Though ne'er I saw thee, draws these tears from me;
How many hearts for thee were broken, how
By Lethe lustreless thou liest now!"
My name, my country—what are they to thee?
What, whether base or proud my pedigree?
Perhaps I far surpassed all other men;
Perhaps I fell below them all; what then?
Suffice it, stranger! that thou seest a tomb;
Thou know'st its use; it hides—no matter whom.
W. Cowper.
Orpheus! No more the rocks, the woods no more,
Thy strains shall lure; no more the savage herds,
Nor hail, nor driving clouds, nor tempest's roar,
Nor chafing billows list thy lulling words;
For thou art dead: and all the Muses mourn,
But most Calliope, thy mother dear.
Shall we then, reft of sons, lament forlorn,
When e'en the gods must for their offspring fear?
J. A. Symonds, M.D.
Wind, gentle evergreen, to form a shade,
Around the tomb where Sophocles is laid;
Sweet ivy, wind thy boughs, and intertwine
With blushing roses and the clustering vine:
Thus will thy lasting leaves, with beauties hung,
Prove grateful emblems of the lays he sung;
Whose soul, exalted like a god of wit,
Among the muses and the graces writ.—Anon.
Hail, dear Euripides, for whom a bed
In black-leaved vales Pierian is spread:
Dead though thou art, yet know thy fame shall be,
Like Homer's, green through all eternity.
If it be true that in the grave the dead
Have sense and knowledge, as some men assert,
I'd hang myself to see Euripides.
Around the tomb, O bard divine!
Where soft thy hallowed brow reposes,
Long may the deathless ivy twine,
And summer pour his waste of roses!
And many a fount shall there distil,
And many a rill refresh the flowers;
But wine shall gush in every rill,
And every fount yield milky showers.
Thus, shade of him whom nature taught
To tune his lyre and soul to pleasure,
Who gave to love his warmest thought,
Who gave to love his fondest measure;
Thus, after death, if spirits feel,
Thou mayest, from odors round thee streaming,
A pulse of past enjoyment steal,
And live again in blissful dreaming.
T. Moore.
Stranger, beware! This grave hurls words like hail:
Here dwells the dread Hipponax, dealing bale.
E'en 'mid his ashes, fretful, poisonous,
He shoots iambics at slain Bupalus.
Wake not the sleeping wasp: for though he's dead,
Still straight and sure his crooked lines are sped.
Here sleeps Archilochus by the salt sea;
Who first with viper's gall the muse did stain,
And bathed mild Helicon with butchery.
Lycambes weeping for her daughters three
Learned this. Pass then in silence: be not fain
To stir the wasps that round his grave remain.
Tell me, good dog, whose tomb you guard so well?
The Cynic's. True: but who that Cynic, tell.
Diogenes, of fair Sinope's race.
What! He that in a tub was wont to dwell?
Yes: but the stars are now his dwelling-place.
J. A. Symonds, M.D.
These are Erinna's songs: how sweet, though slight!—
For she was but a girl of nineteen years:—
Yet stronger far than what most men can write:
Had Death delayed, whose fame had equalled hers?
Does Sappho then beneath thy bosom rest,
Æolian earth? that mortal Muse confessed
Inferior only to the choir above,
That foster-child of Venus and of Love;
Warm from whose lips divine Persuasion came,
Greece to delight, and raise the Lesbian name?
O ye, who ever twine the threefold thread,
Ye Fates, why number with the silent dead
That mighty songstress, whose unrivalled powers
Weave for the Muse a crown of deathless flowers?
Francis Hodgson.
Piera's clarion, he whose weighty brain
Forged many a hallowed hymn and holy strain,
Pindar, here sleeps beneath the sacred earth:
Hearing his songs a man might swear the brood
Of Muses made them in their hour of mirth,
What time round Cadmus' marriage-bed they stood.
As the war-trumpet drowns the rustic flute,
So when your lyre is heard all strings are mute:
Not vain the labor of those clustering bees
Who on your infant lips spread honey-dew;
Witness great Pan who hymned your melodies,
Pindar, forgetful of his pipes for you.
Earth in her breast hides Plato's dust: his soul
The gods forever 'mid their ranks enroll.
And—
Eagle! why soarest thou above the tomb?
To what sublime and starry-paven home
Floatest thou?
I am the image of swift Plato's spirit,
Ascending heaven: Athens does inherit
His corpse below.
Shelley.
Straight is the way to Acheron,
Whether the spirit's race is run
From Athens or from Meroë:
Weep not, far off from home to die;
The wind doth blow in every sky,
That wafts us to that doleful sea.
J. A. Symonds, M.D.
God, grant us good, whether or not we pray;
But e'en from praying souls keep bad away.
Your goods enjoy, as if about to die;
As if about to live, use sparingly.
That man is wise, who, bearing both in mind,
A mean, befitting waste and thrift, can find.
Burgess.
Why shrink from Death, the parent of repose,
The cure of sickness and all human woes?
As through the tribes of men he speeds his way,
Once, and but once, his visit he will pay;
Whilst pale diseases, harbingers of pain,
Close on each other crowd—an endless train.
W. Shepherd.
All life's a scene, a jest: then learn to play,
Dismissing cares, or bear your pains alway.
This wretched life of ours is Fortune's ball;
'Twixt wealth and poverty she bandies all:
These, cast to earth, up to the skies rebound;
These, tossed to heaven, come trembling to the ground.
Oh for the joy of life that disappears!—
Weep then the swiftness of the flying years:
We sit upon the ground and sleep away,
Toiling or feasting; but time runs for aye,
Runs a fell race against poor wretched man,
Bringing for each the day that ends his span.
Tears were my birthright; born in tears,
In tears too must I die;
And mine has been, through life's long years,
A tearful destiny.
Such is the state of man; from birth
To death all comfortless:
Then swept away beneath the earth
In utter nothingness.
Edward Stokes.
My sire begat me; 'twas no fault of mine:
But being born, in Hades I must pine:
O birth-act that brought death! O bitter fate
That drives me to the grave disconsolate!
To naught I turn, who nothing was ere birth;
For men are naught and less than nothing worth.
Then let the goblet gleam for me, my friend;
Pour forth care-soothing wine, ere pleasures end.
[206] See Fitzgerald's faultless translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, published by Quaritch.
Morn follows morn; till while we careless play
Comes suddenly the darksome king, whose breath
Or wastes or burns or blows our life away,
But drives us all down to one pit of death.
Thou sleepest, friend: but see, the beakers call!
Awake, nor dote on death that waits for all.
Spare not, my Diodorus, but drink free
Till Bacchus loose each weak and faltering knee.
Long will the years be when we can't carouse—
Long, long: up then ere age hath touched our brows.
Drink and be merry. What the morrow brings
No mortal knoweth: wherefore toil or run?
Spend while thou mayst, eat, fix on present things
Thy hopes and wishes: life and death are one.
One moment: grasp life's goods; to thee they fall:
Dead, thou hast nothing, and another all.
Goldwin Smith.
[210] The country that gave birth to me is Gadara, an Attic city on Assyrian shores.
[211] Who grew to man's estate in Tyre and Gadara, and found a fair old age in Cos. If then thou art a Syrian, Salaam! if a Phœnician, Naidios! if a Hellene, Hail!
I'll twine white violets, and the myrtle green;
Narcissus will I twine, and lilies sheen;
I'll twine sweet crocus, and the hyacinth blue;
And last I twine the rose, love's token true:
That all may form a wreath of beauty meet
To deck my Heliodora's tresses sweet.
Goldwin Smith.
Poor Cleariste loosed her virgin zone
Not for her wedding, but for Acheron;
'Twas but last eve the merry pipes were swelling,
And dancing footsteps thrilled the festive dwelling;
Morn changed those notes for wailings loud and long,
And dirges drowned the hymeneal song;
Alas! the very torches meant to wave
Around her bridal couch, now light her to the grave!
J. A. Symonds, M.D.
Fair blows the breeze: the seamen loose the sail:—
O men that know not love, your favoring gale
Steals half my soul, Andragathos, from me!
Thrice lucky ships, and billows of the sea
Thrice blessed, and happiest breeze that bears the boy!
Oh would I were a dolphin, that my joy,
Here on my shoulders ferried, might behold
Rhodes, the fair island thronged with boys of gold!
[215] "O soul too loving, cease at length from even in dreams thus idly basking in the warmth of Beauty's empty shapes."
[216] "Pour forth; and again cry, again, and yet again, 'to Heliodora!'"
[217] "I pray thee, Earth, all-nourishing, in thy deep breast, O mother, to enfold her tenderly, for whom my tears must flow for aye."
[218] "This one boon I ask of thee, great mother of all gods, beloved Night! Nay, I beseech thee, thou fellow wanderer with Revelry, O holy Night!"
[219] "The boy is honey-teared, tireless of speech, swift, without sense of fear, with laughter on his roguish lips, winged, bearing arrows in a quiver on his shoulders."
[220] "Why vainly in thy bonds thus pant and fret? Love himself bound thy wings and set thee on a fire, and rubbed thee, when thy breath grew faint with myrrh, and when thou thirstedst gave thee burning tears to drink."
[221] "A reveller I go freighted with fire not wine beneath the region of my heart."
[222] "How could it be that poet also should not sing fair songs in spring?"
[223] Those who on the shores of the Mediterranean have traced out beds of red tulips or anemones or narcissus from terrace to terrace, over rocks and under olive-branches, know how delicately true to nature is the thought contained in the one epithet οὐρεσίφοιτα—roaming like nymphs along the hills, now single and now gathered into companies, as though their own sweet will had led them wandering.
Soar upward to the air divine:
Spread broad thy pinions aquiline:
Carry amid thy plumage him
Who fills Jove's beaker to the brim:
Take care that neither crookèd claw
Make the boy's thigh or bosom raw;
For Jove will wish thee sorry speed
If thou molest his Ganymede.
Drink now, and love, Democrates; for we
Shall not have wine and boys eternally:
Wreathe we our heads, anoint ourselves with myrrh,
Others will do this to our sepulchre:
Let now my living bones with wine be drenched;
Water may deluge them when I am quenched.
Gazing at stars, my star? I would that I were the welkin,
Starry with infinite eyes, gazing forever at thee!
Frederick Farrar.
Kissing Helena, together
With my kiss, my soul beside it
Came to my lips, and there I kept it—
For the poor thing had wandered thither,
To follow where the kiss should guide it,
Oh cruel I to intercept it!
Shelley.
Shine forth, night-wandering, horned, and vigilant queen,
Through the shy lattice shoot thy silver sheen;
Illume Callistion: for a goddess may
Gaze on a pair of lovers while they play.
Thou enviest her and me, I know, fair moon,
For thou didst once burn for Endymion.
We trod the brimming wine-press ankle-high,
Singing wild songs of Bacchic revelry:
Forth flowed the must in rills; our cups of wood
Like cockboats swam upon the honeyed flood:
With these we drew, and as we filled them, quaffed,
With no warm Naiad to allay the draught:
But fair Rhodanthe bent above the press,
And the fount sparkled with her loveliness:
We in our souls were shaken; yea, each man
Quaked beneath Bacchus and the Paphian.
Ah me! the one flowed at our feet in streams—
The other fooled us with mere empty dreams!
[230] Comus, 463, etc.
Three things must epigrams, like bees, have all;
A sting and honey and a body small.
Riley.
[232] A certain Cyril gives this as his definition of a good epigram (ii. 75; compare No. 342 on p. [69]):
πάγκαλόν ἐστ' ἐπίγραμμα τὸ δίστιχον· ἢν δὲ παρέλθῃς
τοὺς τρεῖς, ῥαψῳδεῖς κοὐκ ἐπίγραμμα λέγεις.
Two lines complete the epigram—or three:
Write more; you aim at epic poetry.
Here the essence of this kind of poetry is said to be brevity. But nothing is said about a sting. And on the point of brevity, the Cyril to whom this couplet is attributed is far too stringent when judged by the best Greek standards. The modern notion of the epigram is derived from a study of Martial, whose best verses are satirical and therefore of necessity stinging.
Spring with her waving trees
Adorns the earth: to heaven
The pride of stars is given:
Athens illustrates Greece:
She on her brows doth set
Of men this coronet.
Though thou shouldst gnaw me to the root,
Destructive goat, enough of fruit
I bear, betwixt my horns to shed,
When to the altar thou art led.
Merivale.
The Germans at Greek
Are sadly to seek,
Not five in five-score,
But ninety-five more;
All—save only Hermann;
And Hermann's a German.
Porson.
Attic maid! with honey fed,
Bear'st thou to thy callow brood
Yonder locust from the mead,
Destined their delicious food?
Ye have kindred voices clear,
Ye alike unfold the wing,
Migrate hither, sojourn here,
Both attendant on the spring.
Ah! for pity drop the prize;
Let it not with truth be said,
That a songster gasps and dies,
That a songster may be fed.
W. Cowper.
Though but the being of a day,
When I yon planet's course survey,
This earth I then despise;
Near Jove's eternal throne I stand,
And quaff from an immortal hand
The nectar of the skies.
Philip Smyth.
[238] Bacon's version, "The world's a bubble, and the life of man—," is both well known and too long to quote. The following is from the pen of Sir John Beaumont:
What course of life should wretched mortals take?
In courts hard questions large contention make:
Care dwells in houses, labor in the field,
Tumultuous seas affrighting dangers yield.
In foreign lands thou never canst be blessed;
If rich, thou art in fear; if poor, distressed.
In wedlock frequent discontentments swell;
Unmarried persons as in deserts dwell.
How many troubles are with children born;
Yet he that wants them counts himself forlorn.
Young men are wanton, and of wisdom void;
Gray hairs are cold, unfit to be employed.
Who would not one of these two offers choose,
Not to be born, or breath with speed to lose?
In every way of life true pleasure flows:
Immortal fame from public action grows:
Within the doors is found appeasing rest;
In fields the gifts of nature are expressed.
The sea brings gain, the rich abroad provide
To blaze their names, the poor their wants to hide:
All household's best are governed by a wife;
His cares are light, who leads a single life:
Sweet children are delights which marriage bless;
He that hath none disturbs his thoughts the less.
Strong youth can triumph in victorious deeds;
Old age the soul with pious motions feeds.
All states are good, and they are falsely led
Who wish to be unborn or quickly dead.
Sir John Beaumont.
Where, Corinth, are thy glories now,
Thy ancient wealth, thy castled brow,
Thy solemn fanes, thy halls of state,
Thy high-born dames, thy crowded gate?
There's not a ruin left to tell
Where Corinth stood, how Corinth fell.
The Nereids of thy double sea
Alone remain to wail for thee.
Goldwin Smith.
Seeing the martyred corpse of Sparta's king
Cast 'mid the dead,
Xerxes around the mighty limbs did fling
His mantle red.
Then from the shades the glorious hero cried:
"Not mine a traitor's guerdon. 'Tis my pride
This shield upon my grave to wear.
Forbear
Your Persian gifts; a Spartan I will go
To Death below."
One day three girls were casting lots in play,
Which first to Acheron should take her way;
Thrice with their sportive hands they threw, and thrice
To the same hand returned the fateful dice;
The maiden laughed when thus her doom was told:
Alas! that moment from the roof she rolled!
So sure is Fate whene'er it bringeth bale,
While prayers and vows for bliss must ever fail.
J. A. Symonds. M.D.
Aerial branches of tall oak, retreat
Of loftiest shade for those who shun the heat,
With foliage full, more close than tiling, where
Dove and cicada dwell aloft in air,
Me, too, that thus my head beneath you lay,
Protect, a fugitive from noon's fierce ray.
Goldwin Smith.
Wide-spreading plane-tree, whose thick branches meet
To form for lovers an obscure retreat,
Whilst with thy foliage closely intertwine
The curling tendrils of the clustered vine,
Still mayst thou flourish, in perennial green,
To shade the votaries of the Paphian queen.
W. Shepherd.
Come sit you down beneath this towering tree,
Whose rustling leaves sing to the zephyr's call;
My pipe shall join the streamlet's melody,
And slumber on your charmèd eyelids fall.
J. A. Symonds, M.D.
Spare the parent of acorns, good wood-cutter, spare!
Let the time-honored fir feel the weight of your stroke,
The many-stalked thorn, or acanthus worn bare,
Pine, arbutus, ilex—but touch not the oak!
Far hence be your axe, for our grandams have sung
How the oaks are the mothers from whom we all sprung.
Merivale.
Why, ruthless shepherds, from my dewy spray
In my lone haunt, why tear me thus away?
Me, the Nymphs' wayside minstrel, whose sweet note
O'er sultry hill is heard and shady grove to float?
Lo! where the blackbird, thrush, and greedy host
Of starlings fatten at the farmer's cost!
With just revenge those ravages pursue;
But grudge not my poor leaf and sip of grassy dew.
Wrangham.
Phœbus, thou know'st me—Eunomus, who beat
Spartis: the tale for others I repeat;
Deftly upon my lyre I played and sang,
When 'mid the song a broken harp-string rang,
And seeking for its sound, I could not hear
The note responsive to my descant clear.
Then on my lyre, unasked, unsought, there flew
A grasshopper, who filled the cadence due;
For while six chords beneath my fingers cried,
He with his tuneful voice the seventh supplied:
The midday songster of the mountains set
His pastoral ditty to my canzonet;
And when he sang, his modulated throat
Accorded with the lifeless strings I smote.
Therefore I thank my fellow-minstrel: he
Sits on a lyre in brass, as you may see.
The sculptor's country? Sicyon. His name?
Lysippus. You? Time, that all things can tame.
Why thus a-tiptoe? I have halted never.
Why ankle-winged? I fly like wind forever.
But in your hand that razor? 'Tis a pledge
That I am keener than the keenest edge.
Why falls your hair in front? For him to bind
Who meets me. True: but then you're bald behind?
Yes, because when with winged feet I have passed
'Tis vain upon my back your hands to cast.
Why did the sculptor carve you? For your sake
Here in the porch I stand; my lesson take.
My snowy marble from the mountain rude
A Median sculptor with sharp chisel hewed,
And brought me o'er the sea, that he might place
A trophied statue of the Greeks' disgrace.
But when the routed Persians heard the roar
Of Marathon, and ships swam deep in gore,
Then Athens, nurse of heroes, sculptured me
The queen that treads on arrogance to be:
I hold the scales of hope: my name is this—
Nike for Greece, for Asia Nemesis.
Bright Cytherea thought one day
To Cnidos she'd repair,
Gliding across the watery way
To view her image there.
But when, arrived, she cast around
Her eyes divinely bright,
And saw upon that holy ground
The gazing world's delight,
Amazed, she cried—while blushes told
The thoughts that swelled her breast—
Where did Praxiteles behold
My form? or has he guessed?
J. H. Merivale.
Weep, reckless god; for now your hands are tied:
Weep, wear your soul out with the flood of tears,
Heart-robber, thief of reason, foe to pride,
Winged fire, thou wound unseen the soul that sears!
Freedom from grief to us these bonds of thine,
Wherein thou wailest to the deaf winds, bring:
Behold! the torch wherewith thou mad'st us pine,
Beneath thy frequent tears is languishing!
CHAPTER XXII.
HERO AND LEANDER.
Virgil's Mention of this Tale.—Ovid and Statius.—Autumnal Poetry.—Confusion between the Mythical Musæus and the Grammarian.—The Introduction of the Poem.—Analysis of the Story.—Hallam's Judgment on Marlowe's Hero and Leander.—Comparison of Marlowe and Musæus.—Classic and Romantic Art.
Quid juvenis, magnum cui versat in ossibus ignem
Durus amor? Nempe abruptis turbata procellis
Nocte natat cæca serus freta; quem super ingens
Porta tonat cæli, et scopulis inlisa reclamant
Æquora; nec miseri possunt revocare parentes,
Nec moritura super crudeli funere virgo.[253]
This is the first allusion to a story, rather Roman than Greek, which was destined to play an important part in literature. The introduction of the fable without names into a poem like the third Georgic shows, however, that the pathetic tale of Hero and Leander's love had already found familiar representation in song or sculpture or wall-painting before Virgil touched it with the genius that turned all it touched to gold. Ovid went further, and placed the maiden of Sestos among the heroines for whom he wrote rhetorical epistles in elegiac verse. In Statius, again, we get a glimpse of the story translated from the sphere of romance into the region of antique mythology. To the hero Admetus, Adrastus gives a mantle dyed with Tyrian purple, and embroidered with Leander's death. There flows the Hellespont; the youth is vainly struggling with the swollen waves; and there stands Hero on her tower; and the lamp already flickers in the blast that will destroy both light and lives at once. It still remained for a grammarian of the fifth century, Musæus, of whom nothing but the name is known, to give the final form to this poem of love and death. The spring-tide of the epic and the idyl was over. When Musæus entered the Heliconian meadows to pluck this last pure rose of Greek summer, autumn had already set its silent finger on "bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." His little poem of three hundred and forty hexameters is both an epic and an idyl. While maintaining the old heroic style of narrative by means of repeated lines, it recalls the sweetness of Theocritus in studied descriptions, dactylic cadences, and brief reflective sayings that reveal the poet's mind. Like some engraved gems, the latest products of the glyphic art, this poem adjusts the breadth of the grand manner to the small scale required by jewelry, treating a full subject in a narrow space, and in return endowing slight motives with dignity by nobleness of handling.
Calm mornings of sunshine visit us at times in early November, appearing like glimpses of departed spring amid the wilderness of wet and windy days that lead to winter. It is pleasant, when these interludes of silvery light occur to ride into the woods and see how wonderful are all the colors of decay. Overhead, the elms and chestnuts hang their wealth of golden leaves, while the beeches darken into russet tones, and the wild-cherry glows like blood-red wine. In the hedges crimson haws and scarlet hips are wreathed with hoary clematis or necklaces of coral briony berries; the brambles burn with many-colored flames; the dog-wood is bronzed to purple; and here and there the spindle-wood puts forth its fruit, like knots of rosy buds, on delicate frail twigs. Underneath lie fallen leaves, and the brown brake rises to our knees as we thread the forest paths. Everything is beautiful with beauty born of over-ripeness and decline. Green summer comes no more this year, at any rate. In front are death and bareness and the winter's frost.
Such a day of sunlight in the November of Greek poetry is granted to us by Hero and Leander. The grace of the poem is soul-compelling—indescribable for sweetness. Yet every epithet, each exquisite conceit, and all the studied phrases that yield charm, remind us that the end has come. There is peculiar pathos in this autumnal loveliness of literature upon the wane. In order to appreciate it fully we must compare the mellow tints of Musæus with the morning glory of Homer or of Pindar. We then find that, in spite of so much loss, in spite of warmth and full light taken from us, and promise of the future exchanged for musings on the past, a type of beauty unattainable by happier poets of the spring has been revealed. Not to accept this grace with thanksgiving, because, forsooth, December, that takes all away, is close at hand, would be ungrateful.[254]
Yet, though clearly perceptible by the æsthetic sense, it is far less easy to define its quality than to miss it altogether. We do not gain much, for example, by pointing to the reminiscences of bygone phraseology curiously blended with new forms of language, to the artificial subtleties of rhythm wrung from well-worn metres, to the richness of effect produced by conscious use of telling images, to the iridescent shimmer of mixed metaphors, compound epithets, and daring tropes, contrasted with the undertone of sadness which betrays the "idle singer of an empty day," although these elements are all combined in the autumnal style. Nor will it profit us to distinguish this kind of beauty from the beauté maladive of morbid art. So difficult, indeed, is it to seize its character with any certainty, that in the case of Hero and Leander the uncritical scholars of the Greek Renaissance mistook the evening for the morning star of Greek poetry, confounding Musæus the grammarian with the semi-mythic bard of the Orphean age. When Aldus Manutius conceived his great idea of issuing Greek literature entire from the Venetian press, he put forth Hero and Leander first of all in 1498, with a preface that ran as follows: "I was desirous that Musæus, the most ancient poet, should form a prelude to Aristotle and the other sages who will shortly be imprinted at my hands." Marlowe spoke of "divine Musæus," and even the elder Scaliger saw no reason to suspect that the grammarian's studied verse was not the first clear woodnote of the Eleusinian singer. What renders this mistake pardonable is the fact that, however autumnal may be the poem's charm, no point of the genuine Greek youthfulness of fancy has been lost. Through conceits, confusions of diction, and oversweetness of style emerges the clear outline which characterized Greek art in all its periods. Both persons and situations are plastically treated—subjected, that is to say, to the conditions best fulfilled by sculpture. The emotional element is adequate to the imaginative presentation; the feeling penetrates the form and gives it life, without exceeding the just limits which the form imposes. The importance of this observation will appear when we examine the same poem romantically handled by our own Marlowe. If nothing but the Hero and Leander of Musæus had survived the ruin of Greek literature, we should still be able to distinguish how Greek poets dealt with their material, and to point the difference between the classic and the modern styles.
What is truly admirable in this poem, marking it as genuinely Greek, is the simplicity of structure, clearness of motives, and unaffected purity of natural feeling. The first fifteen lines set forth, by way of proem, the whole subject:
εἰπέ, θεά, κρυφίων ἐπιμάρτυρα λύχνον ἐρώτων,
καὶ νύχιον πλωτῆρα θαλασσοπόρων ὑμεναίων,
καὶ γάμον ἀχλυόεντα, τὸν οὐκ ἴδεν ἄφθιτος Ἠώς,
καὶ Σηστὸν καὶ Ἄβυδον ὅπη γάμος ἔννυχος Ἡροῦς.[255]
Here, perhaps, a modern poet might have stayed his hand: not so Musæus; he has still to say that he will tell of Leander's death, and, in propounding this part of his theme, to speak once more about the lamp:
λύχνον, ἔρωτος ἄγαλμα, τὸν ὤφελεν αἰθέριος Ζεὺς
ἐννύχιον μετ' ἄεθλον ἄγειν ἐς ὁμήγυριν ἄστρων
καί μιν ἐπικλῆσαι νυμφοστόλον ἄστρον ἐρώτων.[256]
Seven lines were enough for Homer while explaining the subject of the Iliad. Musæus, though his poem is so short, wants more than twice as many. He cannot resist the temptation to introduce decorative passages like the three lines just quoted, which are, moreover, appropriate in a poem that aims at combining the idyllic and epic styles.
After the proem we enter on the story. Sestos and Abydos are divided by the sea, but Love has joined them with an arrow from his bow:
ἠΐθεον φλέξας καὶ παρθένον· οὔνομα δ' αὐτῶν
ἱμερόεις τε Λέανδρος ἔην καὶ παρθένος Ἡρώ.[257]
Hero dwelt at Sestos; Leander lived at Abydos; and both were "exceeding fair stars of the two cities." By the sea, outside the town of Sestos, Hero had a tower, where she abode in solitude with one old servant, paying her daily orisons to Dame Kupris, whose maiden votary she was, and sprinkling the altars of Love with incense to propitiate his powerful deity. "Still even thus she did not shun his fire-breathing shafts;" for so it happened that when the festival of Adonis came round, and the women flocked into the town to worship, and the youths to gaze upon the maidens, Hero passed forth that day to Venus's temple, and all the men beheld her beauty, and praised her for a goddess, and desired her for a bride. Leander, too, was there; and Leander could not content himself, like the rest, with distant admiration:
εἷλε δέ μιν τότε θάμβος, ἀναιδείη, τρόμος, αἰδώς·
ἔτρεμε μὲν κραδιήν, αἰδὼς δέ μιν εἶχεν ἁλῶναι·
θάμβεε δ' εἶδος ἄριστον, ἔρως δ' ἀπενόσφισεν αἰδώ·
θαρσαλέως δ' ὑπ' ἔρωτος ἀναιδείην ἀγαπάζων
ἠρέμα ποσσὶν ἔβαινε καὶ ἀντίον ἵστατο κούρης.[258]
He met the maiden face to face, and his eyes betrayed his passion; and she too felt the power of love in secret, and repelled him not, but by her silence and tranquillity encouraged him to hope:
ὁ δ' ἔνδοθι θυμὸν ἰάνθη
ὅττι πόθον συνέηκε καὶ οὐκ ἀπεσείσατο κούρη.[259]
So far one hundred and nine lines of the poem have carried us. The following one hundred and eleven lines, nearly a third of the whole, are devoted to the scene in the temple between Hero and her lover. This forms by far the most beautiful section of the tale; for the attention is concentrated on the boy and girl between whom love at first sight has just been born. In the twilight of early evening, in the recesses of the shrine, they stand together, like fair forms carved upon a bass-relief. Leander pleads and Hero listens. The man's wooing, the maiden's shrinking; his passionate insistance, her gradual yielding, are described in a series of exquisite and artful scenes, wherein the truth of a natural situation is enhanced by rare and curious touches. With genuine Greek instinct the poet has throughout been mindful to present both lovers clearly to the eye, so that a succession of pictures support and illustrate the dialogue, which rises at the climax to a love-duet. The descriptive lines are very simple, like these:
ἠρέμα μὲν θλίβων ῥοδοειδέα δάκτυλα κούρης
βυσσόθεν ἐστονάχιζεν ἀθέσφατον. ἡ δὲ σιωπῇ,
οἷά τε χωομένη, ῥοδέην ἐξέσπασε χεῖρα.[260]
Or again:
παρθενικῆς δ' εὔοδμον ἐΰχροον αὐχένα κύσας.[261]
Or yet again:
ὄφρα μὲν οὖν ποτὶ γαῖαν ἔχεν νεύουσαν ὀπωπήν,
τόφρα δὲ καὶ Λείανδρος ἐρωμανέεσσι προσώποις
οὐ κάμεν εἰσορόων ἁπαλόχροον αὐχένα κούρης.[262]
We do not want more than this: it is enough to animate the plastic figures presented to our fancy. Meanwhile Hero cannot resist the pleadings of Leander, and her yielding is described with beautiful avoidance of superfluous sentiment:
ἤδη καὶ γλυκύπικρον ἐδέξατο κέντρον ἐρώτων,
θέρμετο δὲ κραδίην γλυκερῷ πυρὶ παρθένος Ἡρώ
κάλλεϊ δ' ἱμερόεντος ἀνεπτοίητο Λεάνδρου.[263]
A modern poet would have sought to spiritualize the situation: in the hands of the Greek artist it remains quite natural; it is the beauty of Leander that persuades and subdues Hero to love, and the agitations of her soul are expressed in language which suggests a power that comes upon her from without. At the same time there is no suspicion of levity or sensuality. Hero cannot be mistaken for a light of love. When the time comes, she will break her heart upon the dead body of the youth who wins her by his passion and his beauty. Leander has hitherto been only anxious to possess her for his own. Hero, as soon as she perceives that he has won the fight, bethinks her with a woman's wisdom of ways and means. Who is the strange man to whom she must abandon herself in wedlock; and what does he know about her; and how can they meet? Therefore she tells him her name and describes her dwelling:
πύργος δ' ἀμφιβόητος ἐμὸς δόμος οὐρανομήκης
ᾧ ἔνι ναιετάουσα σὺν ἀμφιπόλῳ τινὶ μούνῃ
Σηστιάδος πρὸ πόληος ὑπὲρ βαθυκύμονας ὄχθας
γείτονα πόντον ἔχω στυγεραῖς βουλῇσι τοκήων.
οὐδέ μοι ἐγγὺς ἔασιν ὁμήλικες, οὐδὲ χορεῖαι
ἠϊθέων παρέασιν· ἀεὶ δ' ἀνὰ νύκτα καὶ ἠῶ
ἐξ ἁλὸς ἠνεμοέντος ἐπιβρέμει οὔασιν ἠχή.[264]
Having said so much, shame overtakes her; she hides her face, and blames her over-hasty tongue. But Leander, pondering how he shall win the stakes of love proposed to him—πῶς κεν ἔρωτος ἀεθλεύσειεν ἀγῶνα—is helped at last by Love himself, the wounder and the healer of the heart in one. He bursts into a passionate protestation: "Maiden, for the love of thee I will cross the stormy waves; yea, though the waters blaze with fire, and the sea be unsailed by ships. Only do thou light a lamp upon thy tower to guide me through the gloom:
ὄφρα νοήσας
ἔσσομαι ὁλκὰς Ἔρωτος ἔχων σέθεν ἀστέρα λύχνον.[265]
Seeing its spark, I shall not need the north star or Orion. And now, if thou wouldst have my name, know that I am Leander, husband of the fair-crowned Hero."
Nothing now remains for the lovers but to arrange the signs and seasons of their future meeting. Then Hero retires to her tower, and Leander returns to Abydos by the Hellespont:
παννυχίων δ' ὀάρων κρυφίους ποθέοντες ἀέθλους
πολλάκις ἠρήσαντο μολεῖν θαλαμηπόλον ὄρφνην.[266]
It may be said in passing that this parting scene, though briefly narrated, is no less well conducted, wohl motivirt, as Goethe would have phrased it, than are all the other incidents of the poem (lines 221-231). The interpretation of the passage turns upon the word παννυχίδας, in line 225, which must here be taken to mean the vigil before marriage.
At this point the action turns. Musæus, having to work within a narrow space, has made the meeting and the dialogue between the lovers disproportionate to the length of the whole piece. In this way he secures our sympathy for the youth and maid, whom we learn to know as living persons. He can now afford to drop superfluous links, and to compress the tale within strict limits. The cunning of his art is shown by the boldness of the transition to the next important incident. The night and the day are supposed to have passed. We hear nothing of the impatience of Leander or of Hero's flux and reflux of contending feelings. The narrative is resumed just as though the old thread had been broken and another had been spun; and yet there is no sense of interruption:
ἤδη κυανόπεπλος ἀνέδραμε νυκτὸς ὀμίχλη
ἀνδράσιν ὕπνον ἄγουσα καὶ οὐ ποθέοντι Λεάνδρῳ.[267]
The lover's attitude of suspense, waiting at nightfall on the beach for Hero's lamp to burn, is so strongly emphasized in the following lines that we are made to feel how anxiously and yearningly the hours of daylight had been spent by him. No sooner does the spark shine forth than Leander darts forward to the waves, and, having prayed to Love, leaps lively in:
ὣς εἰπὼν μελέων ἐρατῶν ἀπεδύσατο πέπλον
ἀμφοτέραις παλάμῃσιν, ἑῷ δ' ἔσφιγξε καρήνῳ,
ἠϊόνος δ' ἐξῶρτο, δέμας δ' ἔρριψε θαλάσσῃ,
λαμπομένου δ' ἔσπευδεν ἀεὶ κατεναντία λύχνου
αὐτὸς ἐὼν ἐρέτης αὐτόστολος αὐτόματος νῆυς.[268]
Hero meanwhile is on the watch, and when her bridegroom gains the shore, breathless and panting, he finds himself within her arms:
ἐκ δὲ θυράων
νυμφίον ἀσθμαίνοντα περιπτύξασα σιωπῇ
ἀφροκόμους ῥαθάμιγγας ἔτι στάζοντα θαλάσσης
ἤγαγε νυμφοκόμοιο μυχοὺς ἐπὶ παρθενεῶνος.[269]
There she washes the stain and saltness of the sea from his body, and anoints him with perfumed oil, and leads him with tender words of welcome to the marriage-bed. The classic poet feels no need of apologizing for the situation, nor does he care to emphasize it. The whole is narrated with Homeric directness, contrasting curiously with the romantic handling of the same incident by Marlowe. Yet the point and pathos of clandestine marriage had to be expressed; and to a Greek the characteristic circumstance was the absence of customary ritual. This defect, while it isolated the lovers from domestic sympathies and troops of friends, attracted attention to themselves, and gave occasion to some of the best verses in the poem:
ἦν γάμος ἀλλ' ἀχόρευτος· ἔην λέχος ἀλλ' ἄτερ ὕμνων·
οὐ Ζυγίην Ἥρην τις ἐπευφήμησεν ἀοιδός·
οὐ δαΐδων ἤστραπτε σέλας θαλαμηπόλον εὐνήν·
οὐδὲ πολυσκάρθμῳ τις ἐπεσκίρτησε χορείῃ,
οὐχ ὑμέναιον ἄεισε πατὴρ καὶ πότνια μήτηρ·
ἀλλὰ λέχος στορέσασα τελεσσιγάμοισιν ἐν ὥραις
σιγὴ παστὸν ἔπηξεν, ἐνυμφοκόμησε δ' ὀμίχλη,
καὶ γάμος ἦν ἀπάνευθεν ἀειδομένων ὑπεμαίων.
νὺξ μὲν ἔην κείνοισι γαμοστόλος, οὐδέ ποτ' ἠὼς
νύμφιον εἶδε Λεάνδρον ἀριγνώτοις ἐνὶ λέκτροις·
νήχετο δ' ἀντιπόροιο πάλιν ποτὶ δῆμον Ἀβύδου
ἐννυχίων ἀκόρητος ἔτι πνείων ὑμεναίων.
Ἡρὼ δ' ἑλκεσίπεπλος, ἑοὺς λήθουσα τοκῆας,
παρθένος ἡματίη νυχίη γυνή. Ἀμφότεροι δὲ
πολλάκις ἠρήσαντο κατελθέμεν ἐς δύσιν ἠώ.[270]
So the night passed, and through many summer nights they tasted the sweets of love, χλοεροῖσιν ἰαινόμενοι μελέεσσιν. But soon came winter, and with winter the sea grew stormy, and ships were drawn up on the beach, and the winds battled with each other in the Hellespontine Straits; and now Hero should have refrained from lighting her lamp, μινυώριον ἀστέρα λέκτρων: but love and fate compelled her, and the night of tempest and of destiny arrived. Manfully Leander wrestled with the waves; yet the storm grew stronger; his strength ebbed away, an envious gust blew out the guiding lamp; and so he perished in the waters. The picture of his death-struggle is painted with brief incisive touches. The last two lines have a strange unconscious pathos in them, as though the life and love of a man were no better than a candle:
καὶ δὴ λύχνον ἄπιστον ἀπέσβεσε πικρὸς ἀήτης
καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ ἔρωτα πολυτλήτοιο Λεάνδρου.[271]
What remains to be told is but little. The cold gray dawn went forth upon the sea; how gray and comfortless they know who, after lonely watching through night hours, have seen discolored breakers beat upon a rainy shore. Hero from her turret gazed through the twilight; and there at her feet lay dead Leander, bruised by the rocks and buffeted by slapping waves. She uttered no cry; but tore the embroidered raiment on her breast, and flung herself, face downward, from the lofty tower. In their death, says the poet after his own fashion, they were not divided:
ἀλλήλων δ' ἀπόναντο καὶ ἐν πυμάτῳ περ ὀλέθρῳ.[272]
This line ends the poem.
This is but a simple story. Yet for that very reason it is one of those stories which can never grow old. As Leigh Hunt, after some unnecessary girding at scholars and sculptors, has sung:
I never think of poor Leander's fate,
And how he swam, and how his bride sat late,
And watched the dreadful dawning of the light,
But as I would of two that died last night.
So might they now have lived, and so have died;
The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side.
What makes it doubly touching is, that this poem of young love and untimely fate was born, like a soul "beneath the ribs of death," in the dotage and decay of Greek art. I do not know whether it has often been noticed that the qualities of romantic grace and pathos were chiefly appreciated by the Greeks in their decline. It is this circumstance, perhaps, which caused the tales of Hero and Leander and Daphnis and Chloe to attract so much attention at the time of the Renaissance. Modern students found something akin to their own modes of feeling in the later classics. Are not the colors of the autumn in harmony with the tints of spring?
The judicious Hallam, in a famous passage of the History of Literature, records his opinion that "it is impossible not to wish that Shakespeare had never written" the sonnets dedicated to Mr. W. H. With the same astounding ἀπειροκαλία, or insensibility to beauty, he ventures to dismiss the Hero and Leander of Marlowe as "a paraphrase, in every sense of the epithet, of the most licentious kind." Yet this severe high-priest of decorum has devoted three pages and a half to the analysis of Romeo and Juliet, in which play we have, as he remarks with justice, "more than in any other tragedy, the mere passion of love; love, in all its vernal promise, full of hope and innocence, ardent beyond all restraint of reason, but tender as it is warm." What can be said of the critical perceptions of one who finds so strongly marked a moral separation between the motives of Marlowe's poem and Shakespeare's play?
The truth is that the words used by Hallam to characterize the subject of Romeo and Juliet are almost exactly applicable to Hero and Leander, after due allowance made for the distinction between the styles of presentation proper to a tragedy in the one case, and in the other to a narrative poem. Reflecting upon this, it is probable that the impartial student will side with Swinburne when he writes: "I must avow that I want, and am well content to want, the sense, whatever it be, which would enable me to discern more offence in that lovely picture of the union of two lovers in body as in soul than I can discern in the parting of Romeo and Juliet."
To discuss the morality of Marlowe's muse is, however, alien to the present purpose. What has to be brought plainly forward is the artistic difference between the methods of Marlowe and Musæus. Hallam, in calling the English Hero and Leander a "paraphrase," was hardly less wrong than Warton, who called it a "translation." It is, in fact, a free and independent reproduction of the story first told by Musæus. Without the poem of Musæus the poem of Marlowe would not have existed; but though the incidents remain unchanged, the whole manner of presenting them, of selecting characteristic details, and of guiding the sympathy and imagination of the reader is altered. In other words, the artistic consciousness had shifted its point of gravity between the ages of Musæus and Marlowe, and a new poem was produced to satisfy the new requirements of the æsthetic ideal. Musæus, as we have already seen, thought it essential to set forth the whole of his subject at the opening in its minutest details: Sestos and Abydos, the marriage-bed on which the morning never shone, the swimming feat of Leander, and the lamp, which was the star of love, till envious fate blew out both love and light and life itself together, all find their proper place in the proemium. In conducting the narrative he is careful to present each motive, as it were, from the outside, to cast the light of his imagination upon forms rendered as distinct as possible in their plasticity, just as the sun's light falls upon and renders visible a statue. There is no attempt to spiritualize the subject, to flood it with emotion, thought, and passion, to pierce into its inmost substance, to find the analogue to its implicit feeling in the depth of his own soul, and, by expressing that, to place his readers at the point of view from which he contemplates the beauty of the fable. The poet withdraws his personality, leaving the animated figures he has put upon the stage of fancy, the carefully prepared situations that display their activity, and the words invented for them, to tell the tale. He can therefore afford to be both simple and direct, brief in descriptive passages, and free from psychological digressions. A few gnomic sentences, here and there introduced, suffice to maintain the reflective character of a meditated work of art. All this is in perfect concord with the Greek conception of art, the sculpturesque ideal.
Marlowe takes another course. The three hundred and forty lines which were enough for Musæus are expanded into six sestiads or cantos, each longer than the whole Greek poem.[273] Yet to this lengthy narrative no prelude is prefixed. Unlike Musæus, Marlowe rushes at once into the story. He does not wait to propound it, or to talk about the fatal lamp, or to describe Hero's tower. That Hero lived in a tower at all we only discover by accident on the occasion of her visit to the shrine of Venus, and Leander makes his first appearance there, guided by no lamp, but by his own audacity. On the other hand, all descriptions that set free the poet's feeling are enormously extended. The one epithet ἱμερόεις, or love-inspiring, for instance, which satisfied Musæus, is amplified by Marlowe through forty lines throbbing with his own deep sense of adolescent beauty. The temple of Venus, briefly alluded to by Musæus, is painted in detail by Marlowe, with a luminous account of its frescos, bass-reliefs, and pavements. The first impassioned speech of Leander runs at one breath over ninety-six verses, while mythological episodes and moral reflections are freely interpolated. All the situations, however delicate, so long as they have raised the poet's sense of beauty to enthusiasm, are treated with elaborate and loving sympathy. In presenting them with their fulness of emotion to the reader, Marlowe taxes his inexhaustible invention to the utmost, and permits the luxuriance of his fancy to run riot. The passion which carries this soul of fire and air up to the empyrean, where it moves at ease, sometimes betrays him into what we know as faults of taste. It is as though the love-ache, grown intense, had passed over for a moment into pain, as though the music, seeking for subtler and still more subtle harmonies, had touched at times on discord.
Compared with the Greek poem, this Hero and Leander of Marlowe is like some radiant double-rose placed side by side with the wild-brier whence it sprang by cultivation. The petals have been multiplied, the perfume deepened and intensified, the colors varied in their modulations of a single tint. At the same time something in point of simple form has been sacrificed. The first thing, then, that strikes us in turning from Musæus to Marlowe is that what the Greek poet considered all-important in the presentation of his subject has been dropped or negligently handled by the English, while the English poet has been prodigal in places where the Greek displayed his parsimony. On looking further, we discover that the modern poet, in all these differences, aims at effects not realized by ancient art. The life and play and actual pulsations of emotion have to be revealed, both as they exist in the subject of the poem and as the poet finds them in his own soul. Everything that will contribute to this main achievement is welcomed by the poet, and the rest rejected. All the motives which had an external statuesque significance for the Greek must palpitate with passion for the English. Those that cannot clothe themselves with spirit as with a garment are abandoned. He wants to make his readers feel, not see: if they see at all, they must see through their emotion; whereas the emotion of the Greek was stirred in him through sight. We do not get very far into the matter, but we gain something, perhaps, by adding that as sculpture is to painting and music, so is the poetry of Musæus to that of Marlowe. In the former, feeling is subordinate, or, at most, but adequate, to form; in the latter, Gefühl ist alles.
What has just been advanced is stated broadly, and is therefore only accurate in a general sense. For while the Greek Leander contains exquisite touches of pure sentiment, so the English Leander offers fully perfected pictures of Titianesque beauty. Still, this does not impair the strength of the position: what is really instructive in the comparative study of the two tales of Hero and Leander will always be that the elder poem, in spite of its autumnal quality, is classical; the younger, in spite of its most utter paganism, is romantic. To enter into minute criticism of Marlowe's poem would be out of place here; and, were it included in my programme, I should shrink from this task as a kind of profanation. Those who have the true sense of ideal beauty, and who can rise by sympathy above the commonplaces of every-day life into the free atmosphere of art, which is nature permeated with emotion, will never forget the prolonged, recurring, complex cadences of that divinest dithyramb poured forth from a young man's soul. Every form and kind of beauty is included in his adoration, and the whole is spiritualized with imagination, ardent and passionate beyond all words.