CHORAL ODE (Eripides' Medea, Lines 627-662.)
[From the same]
The loves in excess bring nor virtue nor fame,
But if Cypris gently should come,
No goddess of heaven so pleasing a dame:
Yet never, O mistress, in sure passion steeped,
Aim at me thy gold bow's barbed flame.
May temperance watch o'er me, best gift of the gods,
May ne'er to wild wrangling and strifes
Dread Cypris impel me soul-pierced with strange lust;
But with favoring eye on the quarrelless couch
Spread she wisely the love-beds of wives!
Oh fatherland! Oh native home!
Never city-less
May I tread the weary path of want
Ever pitiless
And full of doom;
But on that day to death, to death be slave!
Without a country's worse than in a grave.
Mine eye hath seen, nor do I muse
On other's history.
Nor home nor friend bewails thy nameless pangs.—
Perish dismally
The fiend who fails
To cherish friends, turning the guileless key
Of candor's gate! Such friend be far from me!
[WILLIAM E. BARTON]
William Eleazar Barton, novelist and theologian, was born at Sublette, Illinois, June 28, 1861. He reached Kentucky for the first time on Christmas Day of 1880, and matriculated as a student in Berea College, where he spent the remainder of the college year of 1880-1881, and four additional years. During two summers and autumns he taught school in Knox county, Kentucky, then without a railroad, taking long rides to Cumberland Gap, Cumberland Falls and other places which have since appeared in his stories. The two remaining vacations he spent in travel through the mountains, journeying by Ohio river steamer along the northern counties, and by horseback far into the Kentucky hills in various directions. In 1885 Mr. Barton graduated from Berea with the B. S. degree; and three years later the same institution granted him M. S., and, in 1890, A. M. He was ordained to the Congregational ministry at Berea, Kentucky, June 6, 1885, and he preached for two years in southern Kentucky and in the adjacent hills of east Tennessee, living at Robbins, Tennessee. Mr. Barton's first book was a Kentucky mountain sketch, called The Wind-Up of the Big Meetin' on No Bus'ness (1887), now out of print. This was followed by Life in the Hills of Kentucky (1889), depicting actual conditions. He became pastor of a church at Wellington, Ohio, in 1890, and his next two works were church histories. Berea College conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity upon Mr. Barton in 1895; and he has been a trustee of the college for the last several years. He was pastor of a church in Boston for six years, but since 1899, he has been in charge of the First Congregational Church of Oak Park, Illinois. Dr. Barton's other books are: A Hero in Homespun (New York, 1897), a Kentucky story, the first of his books that was widely read and reviewed; Sim Galloway's Daughter-in-Law (Boston, 1897), the Kentucky mountains again, which reappear in The Truth About the Trouble at Roundstone (Boston, 1897); The Story of a Pumpkin Pie (Boston, 1898); The Psalms and Their Story (Boston, 1898); Old Plantation Hymns (1899); When Boston Braved the King (Boston, 1899); The Improvement of Perfection (1900); The Prairie Schooner (Boston, 1900); Pine Knot (New York, 1900), his best known and, perhaps, his finest tale of Kentucky; Lieut. Wm. Barton (1900); What Has Brought Us Out of Egypt (1900); Faith as Related to Health (1901); Consolation (1901); I Go A-Fishing (New York, 1901); The First Church of Oak Park (1901); The Continuous Creation (1902); The Fine Art of Forgetting (1902); An Elementary Catechism (1902); The Old World in the New Century (1902); The Gospel of the Autumn Leaf (1903); Jesus of Nazareth (1904); Four Weeks of Family Worship (1906); The Sweetest Story Ever Told (1907); with Sydney Strong and Theo. G. Soares, His Last Week, His Life, His Friends, His Great Apostle (1906-07); The Week of Our Lord's Passion (1907); The Samaritan Pentateuch (1906); The History and Religion of the Samaritans (1906); The Messianic Hope of the Samaritans (1907); The Life of Joseph E. Roy (1908); Acorns From an Oak Park Pulpit (1910); Pocket Congregational Manual (1910); Rules of Order for Ecclesiastical Assemblies (1910); Bible Classics (1911); and Into All the World (1911). Since 1900 Dr. Barton has been on the editorial staff of The Youth's Companion. The locale of his novels was down on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, amid ignorance and poverty—a background upon which no other writer has painted.
Bibliography. The Nation (August 9, 1900); The Book Buyer (November, 1900); The Independent (July 7, 1910).