3.
Great Homer came first in a snow-white shroud,
And Virgil sang sweet by his side;
While Cicero thundered in accents loud,
And Caesar most gravely replied.
4.
Anacreon, too, from his rhythmical lips
The honey of Hybla distilled,
And Herodotus suffered a partial eclipse,
While Horace with music was filled.
5.
The procession of ancients was brilliant and long,
Aristotle and Plato were there,
Thucydides, too, and Tacitus strong,
And Plutarch, and Sappho the fair.
6.
Aristophanes elbowed gay Ovid's white ghost,
And Euripides Xenophon led,
While Propertius laughed loud at Juvenal's jokes,
And Sophocles rose from the dead.
7.
Then followed a throng to memory dear,
Of writers more modern in age,
Cervantes and Shakespeare, who died the same year,
And Chaucer, and Bacon the sage.
8.
Immortal the laurels that decked the fair throng,
And Dante moved by with his lyre,
While Montaigne and Pascal stood rapt by his song,
And Boccaccio paused to admire.
9.
Sweet Spenser and Calderon moved arm in arm,
While Milton and Sidney were there,
Pope, Dryden, and Molière added their charm,
And Bunyan, and Marlowe so rare.
10.
Then Gibbon stalked by in classical guise,
And Hume, and Macaulay, and Froude,
While Darwin, and Huxley, and Tyndall looked wise,
And Humboldt and Comte near them stood.
11.
Dean Swift looked sardonic on Addison's face,
And Johnson tipped Boswell a wink,
Walter Scott and Jane Austen hobnobbed o'er a glass,
And Goethe himself deigned to drink.
12.
Robert Burns followed next with Thomas Carlyle,
Jean Paul paired with Coleridge, too,
While De Foe elbowed Goldsmith, the master of style,
And Fielding and Schiller made two.