Mr. Dakyns’s manuscript breaks off abruptly, but he left some headings for what he intended to write: Sappho, Goethe, Béranger, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Life at Farringford, The French Tour and Clough, Clough and the Pyrenees. I think he would have quoted first from Sappho the lines beginning:
οἷον τὸ γλυκυμᾶλον ἐρεύθεται ἀκρῷ ἐπ᾽ ὐσδῷ
Like the sweet apple that reddens upon the topmost bough,
for he loved the passage, and the book was left open at this page.
No doubt he would have gone on to quote others that were favourites both with the Poet and with himself. Such as the heart-sick cry of love:
δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα
καὶ Πληιάδες, μέσαι δὲ
νύκτες, παρὰ δ᾽ ἔρχετ᾽ ὥρα,
ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.
The moon has set, the Pleiades have gone;
Midnight! The hour has past, and I
Sleep here alone.
Or again:
γλυκεῖα μᾶτερ, οὔτοι δύναμαι κρέκην τὸν ἱστόν,
πόθῳ δαμεῖσα παιδὸς βραδινὰν δι᾽ ᾽Αφροδίταν
Dear mother mine, I cannot weave my web—
My heart is sick with longing for my dear,
Through Aphrodite fair.
And he would probably have included that longer poem of passion which has been the wonder of the world, that invocation to
Starry-throned, immortal Aphrodite.
ποικιλόθρον᾽, ἀθάνατ᾽ ᾽Αφροδίτα.
Mr. Dakyns did not tell me himself what he had learnt of Simonides from Tennyson, but Tennyson quoted the following poems to his eldest son, Hallam. The sad, comforting, beautiful chant of Danaë to her baby, afloat on the waters, was quoted in one of Mr. Dakyns’s last letters to me, when his mind was full of his unfinished article. He wrote: “Isn’t that lovely and tear-drawing? true and tender and sempiternal?” And then he copied out the whole song, in case I should chance not to have the text at hand, with J. A. Symonds’s translation beside it: