*....*....*....*
Guilty! Well! The fate of others
Now at length descends on me;
Envy strikes the loftiest ever,
As the lightning on the tree.
Banished! Athens aye hath willed it
For her truest souls of yore;
Now I know thee, Aristides,
As I never knew before.
O forgive me, gallant rival,
If I e'er have wrought thee ill;
Think but of the glorious morning
When we stood on yonder hill,
When Miltiades arrayed us
In the central ranks to stand,
When we charged adown the mountain
On the motley Persian band,
When the shouting wings swept forward,
And we stood, like sea-cliffs fast,
Smiling to behold the nations
Break in foam upon us cast;
When we chased them to the galleys,
Slaughtered thousands by the wave,
Sent them back in rout to Susa,
Heaped the mound above our brave,
And forever through the ages
Sounds our glory, rolling on,
For Miltiades and Athens,
For ourselves and Marathon.
Men of Athens! By your sentence
I am banished from your state;
Humbly to that doom I bow me,
And I leave you to your fate.
Not to me thine awful ending,
Athens, shall the years unfold;
Long shall night have closed these eyelids
Ere that ruin men behold.
Still, when I am long forgotten,
Shall thy haughty sway extend,
Isles and cities, lords and kingdoms,
Forced to court, to sue, to bend,
As, from year to year increasing,
Still thy marts new wealth enclose,
And thy far-resplendent treasures
Dazzle e'en thy fiercest foes.
Wider ports and swifter navies,
Broader fields and richer mines,
Deadlier fights and braver armies,
Statelier halls and fairer shrines,
Loftier accents poured in council,
Nobler thoughts in sweeter song,
Loud proclaim the crown of Hellas
Doth of right to thee belong;
Till thy heart be drunk with glory,
And thy brain be crazed with power,
And the gods o'erhear thy boasting
In some mad, triumphant hour.
Then, when one by one thy subjects
Turn and beard thee in despair,
Calling Sparta to the rescue,
In thy death and spoil to share,—
When thy vines and groves lie desert,
And within thy crowded wall
Pest and famine slay thy chosen,
Slay the foremost chief of all,—
When thy armies throng the dungeons,
And thy shipwrecks heap the strand,—
When thine ancient strain of heroes
Gives no more the proud command,
But thy wisest heads turn faithless,
And thy truest hearts grow dull,
Making all thy counsel folly,
All thy desperate valor null,—
When each fond and mad endeavor,
Clutching at thy fallen crown,
Deeper in the roaring whirlpool
Of perdition sucks thee down,
When at last thy foes surround thee,
Dig the trench, and hem thee in,—
When the dreadful word is spoken,
Which to whisper were a sin,—
When at length, in vile subjection,
Unto Sparta thou shalt sue,
Swearing thou wilt humbly serve her,
Will she but thy life renew,—
In that hour of keenest torture,
When thy star is sunk in night,
Think!—but not of me, whose valor
Thou so foully didst requite;—
Think not of thine outraged heroes,
But of her who banished these,
Think of Athens, false and fickle,
Think not of Themistocles.
But if e'er, in after ages,
Once again thy star should rise,—
If some noble son should save thee,
Like a god that left the skies,
If thy shackles should be broken,
And thou leap to new renown,
Then remember me, my darling,
City of the violet crown!
Then shall endless shouts of triumph
Sound the glories of thy name,
And the songs of generations
All thy matchless gifts proclaim;
Then be every wrong forgotten,
Then be every debt repaid,
And the wreath of every hero
On Athena's altar laid.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The foregoing description is nearly a translation from the Persæ of Æschylus.
BEN JONSON.
Authors are apt to be popularly considered as physically a feeble folk,—as timid, nervous, dyspeptic rhymers or prosers, unfitted to grapple with the rough realities of life. We shall endeavor, in the following pages, to present our readers with the image of one calculated to reverse this impression,—the image of a stalwart man of letters, who lived two centuries and a half ago, in the greatest age of English literature,—who undeniably had brawny fists as well as forgetive faculties,—one who could handle a club as readily as a pen, hit his mark with a bullet as surely as with a word, and, a sort of cross between the bully and the bard, could shoulder his way through a crowd of prize-fighters to take his seat among the tuneful company of immortal poets. This man, Ben Jonson, commonly stands next to Shakespeare in a consideration of the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth; and certainly, if the "thousand-souled" Shakespeare may be said to represent mankind, Ben as unmistakably stands for English-kind. He is "Saxon" England in epitome,—John Bull passing from a name into a man,—a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineering individual, whose intellect and personality cannot be severed, even in thought, from his body and personal appearance. Ben's mind, indeed, was rooted in Ben's character; and his character took symbolic form in his physical frame. He seemed built up, mentally as well as bodily, out of beef and sack, mutton and Canary; or, to say the least, was a joint product of the English mind and the English larder, of the fat as well as the thought of the land, of the soil as well as the soul of England. The moment we attempt to estimate his eminence as a dramatist, he disturbs the equanimity of our judgment by tumbling head-foremost into the imagination as a big, bluff, burly, and quarrelsome man, with "a mountain belly and a rocky face." He is a very pleasant boon companion as long as we make our idea of his importance agree with his own; but the instant we attempt to dissect his intellectual pretensions, the living animal becomes a dangerous subject,—his countenance flames, his great hands double up, his thick lips begin to twitch with impending invective; and while the critic's impression of him is thus all the more vivid, he is checked in its expression by a very natural fear of the consequences. There is no safety but in taking this rowdy leviathan of letters at his own valuation; and the relation of critics towards him is as perilous as that of the juries towards the Irish advocate, who had an unpleasant habit of challenging them to personal combat whenever they brought in a verdict against any of his clients. There is, in fact, such a vast animal force in old Ben's self-assertion, that he bullies posterity as he bullied his contemporaries; and while we admit his claims to rank next to Shakespeare among the dramatists of his age, we beg our readers to understand that we do it under intimidation.