A week passed away, and the convalescent had made good progress. Mr. Falconer had not yet seen his fair guest. Six of the sisters, one remaining with Miss Gryll, performed every evening, at the earnest request of Mr. Gryll, a great variety of music, but always ending with the hymn to their master's saint. The old physician came once or twice, and stayed the night. The Reverend Doctor Opimian went home for his Sunday duties, but took too much interest in the fair Morgana not to return as soon as he could to the Tower. Arriving one morning in the first division of the day, and ascending to the library, he found his young friend writing. He asked him if he were working on the Aristophanic comedy. Mr. Falconer said he got on best with that in the doctor's company. 'But I have been writing,' he said, 'on something connected with the Athenian drama. I have been writing a ballad on the death of Philemon, as told by Suidas and Apuleius.' The doctor expressed a wish to hear it, and Mr. Falconer read it to him.
THE DEATH OF PHILEMON{1}
1 Suidas: sub voce (Greek), Apuleius: Florid, 16.
Closed was Philemon's hundredth year:
The theatre was thronged to hear
His last completed play:
In the mid scene, a sudden rain
Dispersed the crowd—to meet again
On the succeeding day.
He sought his home, and slept, and dreamed.
Nine maidens through his door, it seemed,
Passed to the public street.
He asked them, 'Why they left his home?'
They said, 'A guest will hither come
We must not stay to meet.'
He called his boy with morning light,
Told him the vision of the night,
And bade his play be brought.
His finished page again he scanned,
Resting his head upon his hand,
Absorbed in studious thought
He knew not what the dream foreshowed:
That nought divine may hold abode
Where death's dark shade is felt:
And therefore were the Muses nine
Leaving the old poetic shrine,
Where they so long had dwelt.
II
The theatre was thronged once more,
More thickly than the day before,
To hear the half-heard song.
The day wore on. Impatience came.
They called upon Philemon's name,
With murmurs loud and long.
Some sought at length his studious cell,
And to the stage returned, to tell
What thousands strove to ask.
'The poet we have been to seek
Sate with his hand upon his cheek,
As pondering o'er his task.
'We spoke. He made us no reply.
We reverentially drew nigh,
And twice our errand told.
He answered not We drew more near
The awful mystery then was clear:
We found him stiff and cold.
'Struck by so fair a death, we stood
Awhile in sad admiring mood:
Then hastened back, to say
That he, the praised and loved of all,
Is deaf for ever to your call:
That on this self-same day,
'When here presented should have been
The close of his fictitious scene,
His life's true scene was o'er:
We seemed, in solemn silence awed,
To hear the "Farewell and applaud,"
Which he may speak no more.
'Of tears the rain gave prophecy:
The nuptial dance of comedy
Yields to the funeral train.
Assemble where his pyre must burn:
Honour his ashes in their urn:
And on another day return
To hear his songs again.'
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. A beautiful fiction.
Mr. Falconer. If it be a fiction. The supernatural is confined to the dream. All the rest is probable; and I am willing to think it true, dream and all.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. You are determined to connect the immaterial with the material world, as far as you can.
Mr. Falconer. I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.
The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Certainly, there is much in the material world to displease sensitive and imaginative minds; but I do not know any one who has less cause to complain of it than you have. You are surrounded with all possible comforts, and with all the elements of beauty, and of intellectual enjoyment.
Mr. Falconer. It is not my own world that I complain of.
It is the world on which I look 'from the loopholes of retreat.' I cannot sit here, like one of the Gods of Epicurus, who, as Cicero says, was satisfied with thinking, through all eternity, 'how comfortable he was.'{1} I look with feelings of intense pain on the mass of poverty and crime; of unhealthy, unavailing, unremunerated toil, blighting childhood in its blossom, and womanhood in its prime; of 'all the oppressions that are done under the sun.'