Therefore our Cyclops sorrowed,—not as one
Who can command the gamut of despair;
But as a man who feels his days are done,
So dead they seem,—so desolately bare;
For, though he'd lived a hermit, 'twas but only
Now he discovered that his life was lonely.
The very sea seemed altered, and the shore;
The very voices of the air were dumb;
Time was an emptiness that o'er and o'er
Ticked with the dull pulsation "Will she come?"
So that he sat "consuming in a dream,"
Much like his old forerunner, Polypheme.
Until there came the question, "Is she gone?"
With such sad sick persistence that at last,
Urged by the hungry thought which drove him on,
Along the steep declivity he passed,
And by the summit panting stood, and still,
Just as the horn was sounding on the hill.
Then, in a dream, beside the "Dragon" door,
The smith saw travellers standing in the sun;
Then came the horn again, and three or four
Looked idly at him from the roof, but One,—
A Child within,—suffused with sudden shame,
Thrust forth a hand, and called to him by name.
Thus the coach vanished from his sight, but he
Limped back with bitter pleasure in his pain;
He was not all forgotten—could it be?
And yet the knowledge made the memory vain;
And then—he felt a pressure in his throat,
So, for that night, forgot to milk his goat.
What then might come of silent misery,
What new resolvings then might intervene,
I know not. Only, with the morning sky,
The goat stood tethered on the "Dragon" green,
And those who, wondering, questioned thereupon,
Found the hut empty,—for the man was gone.
A STORY FROM A DICTIONARY.
"Sic visum Veneri: cui placet impares
Formas atque animos sub juga aënea
Saevo mittere cum joco."
—Hor. i. 33.
"Love mocks us all"—as Horace said of old:
From sheer perversity, that arch-offender
Still yokes unequally the hot and cold,
The short and tall, the hardened and the tender;
He bids a Socrates espouse a scold,
And makes a Hercules forget his gender:—
Sic visum Veneri! Lest samples fail,
I add a fresh one from the page of Bayle.
It was in Athens that the thing occurred,
In the last days of Alexander's rule,
While yet in Grove or Portico was heard
The studious murmur of its learned school;—
Nay, 'tis one favoured of Minerva's bird
Who plays therein the hero (or the fool)
With a Megarian, who must then have been
A maid, and beautiful, and just eighteen.