That highway
down from Homer and Hesiod to Horace and Juvenal is more attractive
than the Appian. Reading the classics, or conversing with those
old Greeks and Latins in their surviving works, is like walking
amid the stars and constellations, a high and by way serene to
travel. Indeed, the true scholar will be not a little of an
astronomer in his habits. Distracting cares will not be allowed
to obstruct the field of his vision, for the higher regions of
literature, like astronomy, are above storm and darkness.
But passing by these rumors of bards, let us pause for a moment
at the Teian poet.
There is something strangely modern about him. He is very easily
turned into English. Is it that our lyric poets have resounded
but that lyre, which would sound only light subjects, and which
Simonides tells us does not sleep in Hades? His odes are like
gems of pure ivory. They possess an ethereal and evanescent
beauty like summer evenings, - _which you must perceive with the flower of the
mind_, - and show how slight a beauty could be expressed. You
have to consider them, as the stars of lesser magnitude, with the
side of the eye, and look aside from them to behold them. They
charm us by their serenity and freedom from exaggeration and
passion, and by a certain flower-like beauty, which does not
propose itself, but must be approached and studied like a natural
object. But perhaps their chief merit consists in the lightness
and yet security of their tread;
"The young and tender stalk
Ne'er bends when _they_ do walk."
True, our nerves are never strung by them; it is too constantly
the sound of the lyre, and never the note of the trumpet; but
they are not gross, as has been presumed, but always elevated
above the sensual.
These are some of the best that have come down to us.
ON HIS LYRE.
I wish to sing the Atridae,
And Cadmus I wish to sing;
But my lyre sounds
Only love with its chords.
Lately I changed the strings
And all the lyre;
And I began to sing the labors
Of Hercules; but my lyre
Resounded loves.
Farewell, henceforth, for me,
Heroes! for my lyre
Sings only loves.
TO A SWALLOW.
Thou indeed, dear swallow,
Yearly going and coming,
In summer weavest thy nest,
And in winter go'st disappearing
Either to Nile or to Memphis.
But Love always weaveth
His nest in my heart....
ON A SILVER CUP.
Turning the silver,
Vulcan, make for me,
Not indeed a panoply,
For what are battles to me?
But a hollow cup,
As deep as thou canst
And make for me in it
Neither stars, nor wagons,
Nor sad Orion;
What are the Pleiades to me?
What the shining Bootes?
Make vines for me,
And clusters of grapes in it,
And of gold Love and Bathyllus
Treading the grapes
With the fair Lyaeus
ON HIMSELF.
