THE HARVESTERS
What time in summer, sad with so much light,
The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields;
The harvesters, as famine urges them,
Draw hitherward in thousands, and they wear
The look of those that dolorously go
In exile, and already their brown eyes
Are heavy with the poison of the air.
Here never note of amorous bird consoles
Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs
Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these
Pathetic hands. But taciturn they toil,
Reaping the harvests for their unknowrn lords;
And when the weary labor is performed,
Taciturn they retire; and not till then
Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return,
Swelling the heart with their familiar strain.
Alas! not all return, for there is one
That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks
With his last look some faithful kinsman out,
To give his life's wage, that he carry it
Unto his trembling mother, with the last
Words of her son that comes no more. And dying,
Deserted and alone, far off he hears
His comrades going, with their pipes in time,
Joyfully measuring their homeward steps.
And when in after years an orphan comes
To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade
Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain,
He weeps and thinks--haply these heavy stalks
Ripened on his unburied father's bones.
From 'Monte Circello.'
THE DEATH OF THE YEAR
Ere yet upon the unhappy Arctic lands,
In dying autumn, Erebus descends
With the night's thousand hours, along the verge
Of the horizon, like a fugitive,
Through the long days wanders the weary sun;
And when at last under the wave is quenched
The last gleam of its golden countenance,
Interminable twilight land and sea
Discolors, and the north wind covers deep
All things in snow, as in their sepulchres
The dead are buried. In the distances
The shock of warring Cyclades of ice
Makes music as of wild and strange lament;
And up in heaven now tardily are lit
The solitary polar star and seven
Lamps of the bear. And now the warlike race
Of swans gather their hosts upon the breast
Of some far gulf, and, bidding their farewell
To the white cliffs and slender junipers,
And sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song
Of parting, and a sad metallic clang
Send through the mists. Upon their southward way
They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet
Flamy volcanoes and the seething founts
Of geysers, and the melancholy yellow
Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying
Their lily wings amid the boreal lights,
Journey away unto the joyous shores
Of morning.
From 'An Hour of My Youth.'
JEAN LE ROND D'ALEMBERT
(1717-1783)
ean Le Rond D'Alembert, one of the most noted of the "Encyclopedists," a mathematician of the first order, and an eminent man of letters, was born at Paris in 1717. The unacknowleged son of the Chevalier Destouches and of Mme. de Tencin, he had been exposed on the steps of the chapel St. Jean-le-Rond, near Notre-Dame. He was named after the place where he was found; the surname of D'Alembert being added by himself in later years. He was given into the care of the wife of a glazier, who brought him up tenderly and whom he never ceased to venerate as his true mother. His anonymous father, however, partly supported him by an annual income of twelve hundred francs. He was educated at the college Mazarin, and surprised his Jansenist teachers by his brilliance and precocity. They believed him to be a second Pascal; and, doubtless to complete the analogy, drew his attention away from his theological studies to geometry. But they calculated without their host; for the young student suddenly found out his genius, and mathematics and the exact sciences henceforth became his absorbing interests. He studied successively law and medicine, but finding no satisfaction in either of these professions, with the true instincts of the scholar he chose poverty with liberty to pursue the studies he loved. He astonished the scientific world by his first published works, 'Memoir on the Integral Calculus' (1739) and 'On the Refraction of Solid Bodies' (1741); and while not yet twenty-four years old, the brilliant young mathematician was made a member of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1754 he entered the Académie Française, and eighteen years later became its perpetual secretary.
D'Alembert wrote many and important works on physics and mathematics. One of these, 'Memoir on the General Cause of Winds,' carried away a prize from the Academy of Sciences of Berlin, in 1746, and its dedication to Frederick II. of Prussia won him the friendship of that monarch. But his claims to a place in French literature, leaving aside his eulogies on members of the French Academy deceased between 1700 and 1772, are based chiefly on his writings in connection with the 'Encyclopédie.' Associated with Diderot in this vast enterprise, he was at first, because of his eminent position in the scientific world, its director and official head. He contributed a large number of scientific and philosophic articles, and took entire charge of the revising of the mathematical division. His most noteworthy contribution, however, is the 'Preliminary Discourse' prefixed as a general introduction and explanation of the work. In this he traced with wonderful clearness and logical precision the successive steps of the human mind in its search after knowledge, and basing his conclusion on the historical evolution of the race, he sketched in broad outlines the development of the sciences and arts. In 1758 he withdrew from the active direction of the 'Encyclopédie,' that he might free himself from the annoyance of governmental interference, to which the work was constantly subjected because of the skeptical tendencies it evinced. But he continued to contribute mathematical articles, with a few on other topics. One of these, on 'Geneva,' involved him in his celebrated dispute with Rousseau and other radicals in regard to Calvinism and the suppression of theatrical performances in the stronghold of Swiss orthodoxy.