A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers By Henry David Thoreau




















































































































































 -   In serene hours we
contemplate the tour of the Greek and Latin authors with more
pleasure than the traveller does - Page 127
A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers By Henry David Thoreau - Page 127 of 221 - First - Home

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In Serene Hours We Contemplate The Tour Of The Greek And Latin Authors With More Pleasure Than The Traveller Does The Fairest Scenery Of Greece Or Italy.

Where shall we find a more refined society?

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.

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