The next is a Hymn to Health, hardly less true to Greek feeling than the Hymn to Virtue. Simonides, it will be remembered, had said that the first and best possession to be desired by man is health. The ode is but a rhetorical expansion of this sentence, showing that none of the good things of human life can be enjoyed without physical well-being.
Health! Eldest, most august of all
The blessed gods, on thee I call!
Oh, let me spend with thee the rest
Of mortal life, securely blest!
Oh, mayst thou be my house-mate still,
To shield and shelter me from ill!
If wealth have any grace,
If fair our children's face;
If kinghood, lifting men to be
Peers with the high gods' empery;
If young Love's flying feet
Through secret snares be sweet;
If aught of all heaven's gifts to mortals sent,
If rest from care be dear, or calm content—
These goodly things, each, all of them, with thee
Bloom everlastingly,
Blest Health! Yea, Beauty's year
Breaks into spring for thee, for only thee!
Without thee no man's life is aught but cold and drear.
As an example of the pæan or the prosodial hymn, when it assumed a literary form, I may select an ode to Phœbus, which bears the name of Dionysius. Apollo is here addressed in his character of Light-giver, and leader of the lesser powers of heaven. The stars and the moon are his attendants, rejoicing in his music, and deriving from his might their glory.
Let all wide heaven be still!
Be silent vale and hill,
Earth and whispering wind and sea,
Voice of birds and echo shrill!
For soon amid our choir will be
Phœbus with floating locks, the Lord of Minstrelsy!
O father of the snow-browed morn;
Thou who dost drive the rosy car
Of day's wing-footed coursers, borne
With gleaming curls of gold unshorn
Over heaven's boundless vault afar;
Weaving the woof of myriad rays,
Wealth-scattering beams that burn and blaze,
Enwinding them round earth in endless maze!
The rivers of thy fire undying
Beget bright day, our heart's desire:
The throng of stars to greet thee flying
Through cloudless heaven, join choric dances,
Hailing thee king with ceaseless crying
For joy of thy Phœbean lyre.
In front the gray-eyed Moon advances
Drawn by her snow-white heifers o'er
Night's silent silvery dancing-floor:
With gladness her mild bosom burns
As round the dædal world she turns.
From these specimens we may infer the character of that semi-ethical, semi-religious lyric poetry which was produced so copiously in Greece, and of which we have lost all but accidental remnants. Though not to be compared for grandeur of style and abundance of grace with the odes of Pindar and the fragments of Simonides, they display a careful workmanship, a clear and harmonious development of ideas, that make us long, alas too vainly, for the treasures of a literature now buried in irrevocable oblivion.
FOOTNOTES:
τοῖσιν δ' ἐν μέσσοισι πάϊς φόρμιγγι λιγείῃ
ἱμερόεν κιθάριζε· λίνον δ' ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄειδεν
λεπταλέῃ φωνῇ.—_Iliad_, xviii. 569.
A boy, amid them, from a clear-toned harp
Drew lovely music; well his liquid voice
The strings accompanied.—Lord Derby's Trans.