"Edward, lo! to sudden fate
(Weave we the woof. The thread is spun.)
Half of thy heart we consecrate.
(The web is wove. The work is done.)
Stay, oh stay! nor thus forlorn
Leave me unblessed, unpitied, here to mourn:
In yon bright track that fires the western skies,
They melt, they vanish from my eyes.
But oh! what solemn scenes on Snowdon's height
Descending slow their glittering skirts unroll?
Visions of glory, spare my aching sight!
Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul!
No more our long-lost Arthur we bewail.
All hail, ye genuine kings, Britannia's issue, hail!
"Girt with many a baron bold,
Sublime their starry fronts they rear;
And gorgeous dames and statesmen old
In bearded majesty appear.
In the midst a form divine!
Her eye proclaims her of the Briton line;
Her lion port, her awe-commanding face,
Attempered sweet to virgin grace.
What strings symphonious tremble in the air;
What strains of vocal transport round her play!
Hear from the grave, great Taliessin, hear!
They breathe a soul to animate thy clay.
Bright Rapture calls, and soaring as she sings,
Waves in the eye of heaven her many-colored wings.
"The verse adorn again
Fierce war, and faithful love,
And truth severe, by fairy fiction drest.
In buskined measures move
Pale Grief, and pleasing Pain,
With Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast.
A voice, as of the cherub choir,
Gales from blooming Eden bear;
And distant warblings lessen on my ear,
That lost in long futurity expire.
Fond impious man, thinkest thou yon sanguine cloud,
Raised by thy breath, has quenched the orb of day?
To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,
And warms the nations with redoubled ray.
Enough for me; with joy I see
The different doom our fates assign;
Be thine despair, and sceptred care;
To triumph and to die are mine."
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height
Deep in the roaring tide he plunged to endless night.
THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY
BY TALCOTT WILLIAMS
he greater monuments of Greece all men know, the incomparable peaks of the chain; and the chain lasted seventeen hundred years, nor ever sank to the dead level about. The steadfast sight of these great Greek originals warps and dwarfs our conception of Greek life. We behold the Parthenon; we forget that each village shrine had its sense of proportion and subtle curve. The Venus of Melos we remember, and the Victory is poised forever on its cliff; but Tanagra figurines tell as much, and reveal more, of Greek life. Nor is it otherwise in letters. The great names all know. For a brief span they stood close together, and the father who heard Æschylus might have told his experience to his long-lived son who read Aristotle, while between the two stood all the greatest genius that makes Greece Greek,—save only Homer. So brief was the noonday,—and it is at high noon, and high noon only, that men have agreed to take the sun; but this uplift was gained in the ascent of nigh two hundred years from the first written Greek literature that still lives. The descent, to the last of the Greek verse which still remained poetry, ran through thirteen centuries. Over all this prodigious span of fifteen hundred years stretches the Greek Anthology, a collection of 4,063 short Greek poems, two to eight lines long for the most part, collected and re-collected through more than a thousand years. The first of these poets, Mimnermus, was the contemporary of Jeremiah, and dwelt in cities that shuddered over tidings of Babylonian invasion. The last, Cometas, was the contemporary of Edward the Confessor, and dreaded Seljuk and Turk.
As the epic impulse faded, and before Greek genius for tragedy rose, the same race and dialect which had given epic narrative the proud, full verse that filled like a sail to zephyr and to storm alike, devised the elegiac couplet. With its opening even flow, its swifter rush in the second line, and its abrupt pause, it was a medium in which not narrative but man spoke, whether personal in passion, or impersonal in the dedication of a statue, or in epitaph. This verse had conventions as rigorous and restrained as the sonnet, and was briefer. It served as well for the epitaph of Thermopylæ as for the cradle-bier of a child, dead new-born; and lent itself as gracefully to the gift of a bunch of roses as it swelled with some sonorous blast of patriotism. It could sharpen to a gibe, or sink to a wail at untoward fate. Through a period twice as long as the life of English letters, these short poems set forth the vision of life, the ways and works of men, the love and death of mortals. These lines of weight, of moment, always of grace and often of inspiration, stood on milestones; they graced the base of statues; they were inscribed on tombs; they stood over doorways; they were painted on vases. The rustic shrines held them, and on the front of the great temple they were borne. In this form, friend wrote to friend and lover to lover. Four or five of the best express the emotion of the passing Greek traveler at the statue of Memnon on the Nile. The quality of verse that fills the inn album to-day we all know; but Greek life was so compact of form and thought that even this unknown traveler's verse, scrawled with a stylus, still thrills, still rings, as the statue still sounds its ancient note.