New learning all! yet fresh from fountains old,
Hellenic inspiration, pure and deep:
Strange treasures of Byzantine hoards unroll’d,
And mouldering volumes from monastic sleep,
Reclad with life by more than magic art:
Till that old world renew’d
His youth, and in the past the present own’d its part.
—O vision that ye saw, and hardly saw,
Ye who in Alfred’s path at Oxford trod,
Or in our London train’d by studious law
The little-ones of Christ to Him and God,
Colet and Grocyn!—Though the world forget
The labours of your love,
In loving hearts your names live in their fragrance yet.
O vision that our happier eyes have seen!
For not till peace came with Elizabeth
Did those fair maids of holy Hippocrene
Cross the wan waves and draw a northern breath:
Though some far-echoed strain on Tuscan lyres
Our Chaucer caught, and sang
Like her who sings ere dawn has lit his Eastern fires;—
Herald of that first splendour, when the sky
Was topaz-clear with hope, and life-blood-red
With thoughts of mighty poets, lavishly
Round all the fifty years’ horizon shed:—
Now in our glades the Aglaian Graces gleam,
Around our fountains throng,
And change Ilissus’ banks for Thames and Avon stream.
Daughters of Zeus and bright Eurynomé,
She whose blue waters pave the Aegaean plain,
Children of all surrounding sky and sea,
A larger ocean claims you, not in vain!
Ye who to Helicon from Thessalia wide
Wander’d when earth was young,
Come from Libethrion, come; our love, our joy, our pride!
Ah! since your gray Pierian ilex-groves
Felt the despoiling tread of barbarous feet,
This land, o’er all, the Delian leader loves;
Here is your favourite home, your genuine seat:—
In these green western isles renew the throne
Where Grace by Wisdom shines;
—We welcome with full hearts, and claim you for our own!
If, looking at England, one point may be singled out in that long movement, generalized under the name of the Renaissance, as critical, it is the introduction of the Greek and Latin literature:—which has remained ever since conspicuously the most powerful and enlarging element, the most effectively educational, among all blanches of human study.
In the vale Of fair Aosta; See Anselm’s youthful vision of the gleaners and the palace of heaven (Green: History, B. II: ch. ii).
His Great Work; Roger Bacon’s so-named Opus Majus: ‘At once,’ says Whewell, ‘the Encyclopaedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century.’ Like Vergil, Bacon passed at one time for a magician.
That new doctrine; Grocyn was perhaps the first Englishman who studied Greek under Chalcondylas the Byzantine at Florence; certainly the first who lectured on Greek in England. This was in the Hall of Exeter College, Oxford, in 1491. To him Erasmus (1499) came to study the language.—See the brilliant account of the revival of learning in Green, Hist. B. V: ch. ii.