(1746-1820)
enry Grattan, eminent among Irish orators and statesmen, was born in Dublin, July 3d, 1746. He graduated from Trinity College in 1767, became a law student of the Middle Temple, London, and was admitted to the bar in 1772. He soon became drawn into open political life, entering the Irish Parliament in 1775.
Henry Grattan
In Parliament he espoused the popular cause. His memorable displays of oratory followed fast and plentifully. On April 19th, 1780, he attacked the right of England to legislate for Ireland. With that address his reputation was made. He became incessant in his efforts to remove oppressive legislation. By his eloquence he quickened into life a national spirit, to culminate in a convention at Dungannon on February 15th, 1782, where resolutions in favor of legislative independence were stormily adopted. Presently, after a speech of surpassing power from him, the Declaration of Rights Bill was passed unanimously by both houses, with an unwilling enactment from England. The idol now of Ireland, Grattan was voted by its Parliament a grant of £50,000 "as a testimony of national gratitude for great national services." The next eighteen years saw him resolute to secure for Ireland liberal laws, greater commercial freedom, better conditions for the peasantry, the wiping out of Parliamentary corruption, and especially the absolute emancipation of the Roman Catholics. After the Union he lived in retirement, devoting himself to the study of the classics and to the education of his children until 1805. Then at the request of Fox he entered the imperial Parliament, making his first speech in favor of Fox's motion for a committee on the Roman Catholic Petition, an address described as "one of the most brilliant speeches ever made within the walls of Parliament." In 1806 he was elected a member for Dublin, which city he represented until his decease. His last speech was made on May 5th, 1819, in favor of Roman Catholic emancipation. It is to be noted that he was by profession and conviction a Protestant. He died in 1820. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Chatham and Fox.
In spite of great natural drawbacks, Grattan achieved the highest rank as an orator; and his passionate eloquence has rarely been equaled in fervor and originality.
ON THE CHARACTER OF CHATHAM
The Secretary stood alone; modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No State chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, sank him to the vulgar level of the great; but overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame. Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous.
France sank beneath him. With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded with the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite; and his schemes were to affect, not England and the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished; always seasonable, always adequate, the suggestions of an understanding animated by order and enlightened by prophecy.
The ordinary feelings which render life amiable and indolent were unknown to him. No domestic difficulty, no domestic weakness reached him; but aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to counsel and to decide. A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, and so authoritative astonished a corrupt age; and the treasury trembled at the name of Pitt, through all her classes of venality. Corruption imagined indeed that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy refuted her.
Nor were his political abilities his only talents: his eloquence was an era in the Senate; peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully, it resembled sometimes the thunder and sometimes the music of the spheres. He did not, like Murray, conduct the understanding through the painful subtlety of argumentation, nor was he, like Townshend, forever on the rack of exertion; but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by flashings of the mind, which like those of his eye were felt but could not be followed.
Upon the whole, there was something in this man that could create, subvert, or reform: an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder and to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empires, and strike a blow in the world which should resound throughout the universe.
OF THE INJUSTICE OF DISQUALIFICATION OF CATHOLICS
From the Speech of May 31st, 1811
Whatever belongs to the authority of God, or to the laws of nature, is necessarily beyond the province and sphere of human institution and government. The Roman Catholic, when you disqualify him on the ground of his religion, may with great justice tell you that you are not his God, that he cannot mold or fashion his faith by your decrees. You may inflict penalties, and he may suffer them in silence; but if Parliament assume the prerogative of Heaven, and enact laws to impose upon the people a different religion, the people will not obey such laws. If you pass an act to impose a tax or regulate a duty, the people can go to the roll to learn what are the provisions of the law. But whenever you take upon yourselves to legislate for God, though there may be truth in your enactments, you have no authority to enforce them. In such a case, the people will not go to the roll of Parliament, but to the Bible, the testament of God's will, to ascertain his law and their duty. When once man goes out of his sphere, and says he will legislate for God, he in fact makes himself God. But this I do not charge upon the Parliament, because in none of the Penal Acts has the Parliament imposed a religious creed. It is not to be traced in the qualification oath, nor in the declaration required. The qualifying oath, as to the great number of offices and seats in Parliament, scrupulously evades religious distinctions; a Dissenter of any class may take it, a Deist, an atheist, may likewise take it. The Catholics are alone excepted; and for what reason? Certainly not because the internal character of the Catholic religion is inherently vicious; not because it necessarily incapacitates those who profess it to make laws for their fellow-citizens. If a Deist be fit to sit in Parliament, it can hardly be urged that a Christian is unfit. If an atheist be competent to legislate for his country, surely this privilege cannot be denied to the believer in the divinity of our Savior. But let me ask you if you have forgotten what was the faith of your ancestors, or if you are prepared to assert that the men who procured your liberties are unfit to make your laws? Or do you forget the tempests by which the Dissenting classes of the community were at a former period agitated, or in what manner you fixed the rule of peace over that wild scene of anarchy and commotion? If we attend to the present condition and habits of these classes, do we not find their controversies subsisting in full vigor? and can it be said that their jarring sentiments and clashing interests are productive of any disorder in the State; or that the Methodist himself, in all his noisy familiarity with his Maker, is a dangerous or disloyal subject? Upon what principle can it be argued that the application of a similar policy would not conciliate the Catholics, and promote the general interests of the empire? I can trace the continuance of their incapacities to nothing else than a political combination; a combination that condemned the Catholic religion, not as a heresy, but as a symptom of a civil alienation. By this doctrine, the religion is not so much an evil in itself as a perpetual token of political disaffection. In the spirit of this liberal interpretation, you once decreed to take away their arms, and on another occasion ordered all Papists to be removed from London. In the whole subsequent course of administration, the religion has continued to be esteemed the infallible symptom of a propensity to rebel. Known or suspected Papists were once the objects of the severest jealousy and the bitterest enactments. Some of these statutes have been repealed, and the jealousy has since somewhat abated; but the same suspicions, although in a less degree, pervade your councils. Your imaginations are still infected with apprehensions of the proneness of the Catholics to make cause with a foreign foe. A treaty has lately been made with the King of the Two Sicilies. May I ask: Is his religion the evidence of the warmth of his attachment to your alliance? Does it enter into your calculation as one of the motives that must incline him to our friendship, in preference to the friendship of the State professing his own faith? A similar treaty has been recently entered into with the Prince Regent of Portugal, professing the Roman Catholic religion; and one million granted last year and two millions this session, for the defense of Portugal. Nay, even in the treaty with the Prince Regent of Portugal, there is an article which stipulates that we shall not make peace with France unless Portugal shall be restored to the house of Braganza. And has the Prince of Brazil's religion been considered evidence of his connection with the enemy? You have not one ally who is not Catholic; and will you continue to disqualify Irish Catholics, who fight with you and your allies, because their religion is evidence of disaffection?
But if the Catholic religion be this evidence of repugnance, is Protestantism the proof of affection to the Crown and government of England? For an answer, let us look at America. In vain did you send your armies there; in vain did you appeal to the ties of common origin and common religion. America joined with France, and adopted a connection with a Catholic government. Turn to Prussia, and behold whether her religion has had any effect on her political character. Did the faith of Denmark prevent the attack on Copenhagen? It is admitted on all sides that the Catholics have demonstrated their allegiance in as strong a manner as the willing expenditure of blood and treasure can evince. And remember that the French go not near so far in their defense of Catholicism, as you in your hatred of it in your own subjects and your reverence for it in your allies. They have not scrupled to pull down the ancient fabrics of superstition in the countries subjected to their arms. Upon a review of these facts, I am justified in assuming that there is nothing inherent in Catholicism which either proves disaffection, or disqualifies for public trusts. The immediate inference is that they have as much right as any dissentient sect to the enjoyment of civil privileges and a participation of equal rights; that they are as fit morally and politically to hold offices in the State or seats in Parliament. Those who dispute the conclusion will find it their duty to controvert the reasoning on which it is founded. I do not believe the Church is in any danger; but if it is, I am sure that we are in a wrong way to secure it. If our laws will battle against Providence, there can be no doubt of the issue of the conflict between the ordinances of God and the decrees of man: transient must be the struggle, rapid the event. Let us suppose an extreme case, but applicable to the present point: Suppose the Thames were to inundate its banks, and suddenly swelling, enter this House during our deliberations (an event which I greatly deprecate, from my private friendship with many members who might happen to be present, and my sense of the great exertions which many of them have made for the public interest), and a motion of adjournment being made, should be opposed, and an address to Providence moved that it would be graciously pleased to turn back the overflow and direct the waters into another channel. This, it will be said, would be absurd; but consider whether you are acting upon a principle of greater intrinsic wisdom, when after provoking the resentments you arm and martialize the ambition of men, under the vain assurance that Providence will work a miracle in the constitution of human nature, and dispose it to pay injustice with affection, oppression with cordial support. This is in fact the true character of your expectations; nothing less than that the Author of the Universe should subvert his laws to ratify your statutes, and disturb the settled course of nature to confirm the weak, the base expedients of man. What says the Decalogue? Honor thy father. What says the penal law? Take away his estate! Again, says the Decalogue, Do not steal. The law, on the contrary, proclaims, You may rob a Catholic!
ON THE DOWNFALL OF BONAPARTE
From the Speech of May 25th, 1815
The French government is war; it is a stratocracy, elective, aggressive, and predatory; her armies live to fight, and fight to live; their constitution is essentially war, and the object of that war the conquest of Europe. What such a person as Bonaparte at the head of such a constitution will do, you may judge by what he has done: and first he took possession of a greater part of Europe; he made his son King of Rome; he made his son-in-law Viceroy of Italy; he made his brother King of Holland; he made his brother-in-law King of Naples; he imprisoned the King of Spain; he banished the Regent of Portugal, and formed his plan to take possession of the Crown of England. England had checked his designs; her trident had stirred up his empire from its foundation. He complained of her tyranny at sea; but it was her power at sea which arrested his tyranny on land,—the navy of England saved Europe. Knowing this, he knew the conquest of England became necessary for the accomplishment of the conquest of Europe, and the destruction of her marine necessary for the conquest of England. Accordingly, besides raising an army of 60,000 men for the invasion of England, he applied himself to the destruction of her commerce, the foundation of her naval power. In pursuit of this object and on his plan of a Western empire, he conceived and in part executed the design of consigning to plunder and destruction the vast regions of Russia. He quits the genial clime of the temperate zone; he bursts through the narrow limits of an immense empire; he abandons comfort and security, and he hurries to the Pole to hazard them all, and with them the companions of his victories and the fame and fruits of his crimes and his talents, on speculation of leaving in Europe, throughout the whole of its extent, no one free or independent nation. To oppose this huge conception of mischief and despotism, the great potentate of the north from his gloomy recesses advances to defend himself against the voracity of ambition, amid the sterility of his empire. Ambition is omnivorous; it feasts on famine and sheds tons of blood, that it may starve in ice in order to commit a robbery on desolation. The power of the north, I say, joins another prince, whom Bonaparte had deprived of almost the whole of his authority,—the King of Prussia; and then another potentate, whom Bonaparte had deprived of the principal part of his dominions,—the Emperor of Austria. These three powers, physical causes, final justice, the influence of your victories in Spain and Portugal, and the spirit given to Europe by the achievements and renown of your great commander [the Duke of Wellington], together with the precipitation of his own ambition, combine to accomplish his destruction; Bonaparte is conquered. He who said, "I will be like the Most High," he who smote the nations with a continual stroke,—this short-lived son of the morning, Lucifer,—falls, and the earth is at rest; the phantom of royalty passes on to nothing, and the three kings to the gates of Paris: there they stand, the late victims of his ambition, and now the disposers of his destiny and the masters of his empire. Without provocation he had gone to their countries with fire and sword; with the greatest provocation they came to his country with life and liberty: they do an act unparalleled in the annals of history, such as nor envy, nor time, nor malice, nor prejudice, nor ingratitude can efface; they give to his subjects liberty, and to himself life and royalty. This is greater than conquest! The present race must confess their virtues, and ages to come must crown their monuments, and place them above heroes and kings in glory everlasting....
Do you wish to confirm this military tyranny in the heart of Europe,—a tyranny founded on the triumph of the army over the principles of civil government, tending to universalize throughout Europe the domination of the sword,—and to reduce to paper and parchment, Magna Charta and all our civil constitutions? An experiment such as no country ever made and no good country would ever permit: to relax the moral and religious influences; to set heaven and earth adrift from one another, and make God Almighty a tolerated alien in his own creation; an insurrectionary hope to every bad man in the community, and a frightful lesson to profit and power, vested in those who have pandered their allegiance from king to emperor, and now found their pretensions to domination on the merit of breaking their oaths and deposing their sovereign. Should you do anything so monstrous as to leave your allies in order to confirm such a system; should you forget your name, forget your ancestors, and the inheritance they have left you of morality and renown; should you astonish Europe by quitting your allies to render immortal such a composition, would not the nations exclaim: "You have very providently watched over our interests, and very generously have you contributed to our service,—and do you falter now? In vain have you stopped in your own person the flying fortunes of Europe; in vain have you taken the eagle of Napoleon and snatched invincibility from his standard, if now, when confederated Europe is ready to march, you take the lead in the desertion and preach the penitence of Bonaparte and the poverty of England."
THOMAS GRAY
(1716-1771)
BY GEORGE PARSONS LATHROP
he fame of Thomas Gray is unique among English poets, in that, although world-wide and luminous, it springs from a single poem, a flawless masterpiece,—the 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.' This is the one production by which he is known to the great mass of readers and will continue to be known to coming generations; yet in his own time his other poems were important factors, in establishing the high repute accorded to him then and still maintained in the esteem of critics. Nevertheless, living to be nearly fifty-five and giving himself exclusively to letters, the whole of the work that he left behind him amounted only to some fourteen hundred lines.
His value to literature and to posterity, therefore, is to be measured not by the quantity of his literary contributions or by any special variety in their scope, but by a certain wholesome and independent influence which he exerted upon the language of poetry, and by a rare quality of intense yet seemingly calm and almost repressed genius, which no one among his commentators has been able to define clearly. The most comprehensive thing ever written about him—wise, just, witty, yet sympathetic and penetrating—is the essay by James Russell Lowell in his final volume of criticism.
"It is the rarest thing," says Lowell, "to find genius and dilettantism united in the same person (as for a time they were in Goethe): for genius implies always a certain fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes it seem fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on occasion; while the main characteristic of the dilettante is that sort of impartiality which springs from inertia of mind, admirable for observation, incapable of turning it to practical account. Yet we have, I think, an example of this rare combination of qualities in Gray; and it accounts both for the kind of excellence to which he attained, and for the way in which he disappointed expectation.... He is especially interesting as an artist in words and phrases, a literary type far less common among writers of English than it is in France or Italy, where perhaps the traditions of Latin culture were never wholly lost.... When so many have written so much, we shall the more readily pardon the man who has written too little or just enough."
He was born in London, December 26th, 1716, the son of a money scrivener who had dissipated most of his inherited property, but was skilled in music, and perhaps transmitted to the son that musical element which gives beauty and strength to his poetry. Gray's mother was a woman of character, who with his aunt set up an India warehouse and supported herself; also sending the young man to St. Peter's College, Cambridge, after his studies at Eton. Leaving college without a degree, he traveled on the Continent of Europe with Horace Walpole in 1739; then returned to Cambridge and passed the remainder of his life in the university, as a bachelor of civil law nominally,—not practicing, but devoting himself to study and to excursions through rural England. He had a profound and passionate love for nature, a kind of religious exaltation in the contemplation of it and in mountain worship, which was at variance with the prevailing eighteenth-century literary mood and prefigured the feeling of Wordsworth. His mother having retired to Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, he often made visits there; and the church-yard of his deathless 'Elegy' is generally believed to be that of the parish church at Stoke Poges. It was here that he was laid to rest in the same tomb with his mother and his aunt, after his death, July 24th, 1771.
The 'Elegy' was finished in 1749. He had begun writing it seven years before. This has sometimes been alluded to as an instance in point of Horace's advice, that a poem should be matured for seven years. The length of time given to the 'Elegy,' however, may be accounted for partly by Gray's dilatory habits of writing, and partly by the parallel of Tennyson's long delay in perfecting the utterance of his meditations on the death of his friend Hallam through 'In Memoriam.' Gray's dearest friend, Richard West, died in 1742; and it was apparently under the stress of that sorrow that he began the 'Elegy,' which was completed only in 1749. Two years later it was published. It won the popular heart immediately, and passed through four editions in the first twelvemonth.
Of Gray's other poems, those which have left the deepest impression are his 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,' 'The Progress of Poesy,' and 'The Bard.' The last two are somewhat Pindaric in style, but also suggest the influence of the Italian canzone. In the Eton College ode, his first published piece, occurs the phrase since grown proverbial, "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." It is a curious fact that while most readers know Gray only as the author of the 'Elegy,' every one is familiar with certain lines coined by him, but unaware of their source. For instance, in 'The Progress of Poesy,' he speaks of
"The unconquerable mind, and freedom's holy flame."
It is in the same place that he describes Milton as "blasted with excess of light," and in alluding to Dryden, evolves the image of
"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."
His, too, in 'The Bard,' is the now well-known line—
"Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm."
Many of his finest expressions are in part derived from classic or other poets; but he showed undeniable genius in his adaptation, transformation, or new creation from these suggestive passages.
Gray was small and delicate in person, handsome and refined, fond of fashionable dress, and preferred to be known as a "gentleman" rather than a poet. He was very reticent, somewhat melancholy, and an invalid; a man also of vast erudition, being learned not only in literature but in botany, zoology, antiquities, architecture, art, history, and philosophy as well. He enjoyed the distinction of refusing the post of poet laureate, after the death of Cibber. On the other hand, he coveted the place of professor of modern literature and languages at Cambridge University, to which he was appointed in 1769; but he never performed any of the duties of his professorship beyond that of drawing the salary.
He brought forth nothing in the special kinds of knowledge which he had acquired in such large measure; and the actual ideas conveyed in his poetry were not original, but savored rather of the commonplace. Lowell says of the 'Elegy' that it won its popularity "not through any originality of thought, but far more through originality of sound." There must, however, be some deeper reason than this for the grasp which it has upon the minds and hearts of all classes. Two elements of power and popularity it certainly possessed in the highest degree. One is the singular simplicity of its language (a result of consummate art), which makes it understandable by everybody. The other is the depth and the sincerity of the emotion with which it imbues thoughts, sentiments, and reflections that are common to the whole of mankind. The very unproductiveness of Gray's mind in other directions probably helped this one product. The quintessence of all his learning, his perceptive faculty, and his meditations was infused into the life-blood of this immortal poem.
STOKE POGES CHURCH AND CHURCHYARD.
The burial-place of Thomas Gray and the scene of his famous Elegy.
Photogravure from a Photograph.
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea;
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower,
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient, solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care;
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield;
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike th' inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honor's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull, cold ear of Death?
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest;
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood.
Th' applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of Pain and Ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes,—
Their lot forbade; nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;
The struggling pangs of conscious Truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous Shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.
[The thoughtless world to Majesty may bow,
Exalt the brave, and idolize success;
But more to Innocence their safety owe,
Than Power and Genius e'er conspired to bless.]
[Hark, how the sacred calm that broods around
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease,
In still, small accents whispering from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace.]
Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learned to stray;
Along the cool, sequestered vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
Yet even these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial, still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
Their names, their years, spelt by th' unlettered Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply;
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.
For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?
On some fond breast the parting soul relies;
Some pious drops the closing eye requires:
E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries;
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.
For thee who, mindful of th' unhonored dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If, chance, by lonely Contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
Haply some hoary-headed swain may say:—
"Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
"There at the foot of yonder nodding beech
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
"Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies, he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful-wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love.
"One morn I missed him on the 'customed hill,
Along the heath, and near his favorite tree:
Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood, was he:
"The next, with dirges due in sad array,
Slow through the church-way path we saw him borne;—
Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."
["There scattered oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground.">[
The Epitaph
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth,
A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown;
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere;
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Misery all he had,—a tear;
He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wished) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose,)—
The Bosom of his Father and his God.
[The stanzas included in brackets were omitted by Gray in the first edition of the 'Elegy,' and as sanctioned by him or by later editors are (except as to the third one) of infrequent appearance in the poem.]
ODE ON THE SPRING
Lo! Where the rosy-bosomed Hours,
Fair Venus's train, appear,
Disclose the long-expecting flowers,
And wake the purple year!
The Attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo's note,
The untaught harmony of spring;
While, whispering pleasure as they fly,
Cool zephyrs through the clear blue sky
Their gathered fragrance fling.
Where'er the oak's thick branches stretch
A broader, browner shade,
Where'er the rude and moss-grown beech
O'er-canopies the glade,
Beside some water's rushy brink
With me the Muse shall sit, and think
(At ease reclined in rustic state)
How vain the ardor of the crowd,
How low, how little are the proud,
How indigent the great!
Still is the toiling hand of Care;
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
he 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 Æschylus 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 Thermopylæ 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 Dübner for Didot's 'Bibliotheca Scriptorum Græcorum,' 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.
