Pericles tells me that the philosophers here are as susceptible of malice as of love. It may be so, for the plants which are sweet in some places are acrid in others.

He said to me, smiling, "I shall be represented in their schools as a sophist, because Aspasia and Alcibiades were unruly. O that boy! who knows but his mischievous verses will be a reason sufficient, in another year, why I am unable to command an army or harangue an assembly of the people?"

XX. XENIADES TO ASPASIA.

Aspasia! Aspasia have you forgotten me? have you forgotten us? Our childhood was one, our earliest youth was undivided. Why should you not see me? Did you fear that you would have to reproach me for any fault I have committed? This would have pained you formerly; ah, how lately!

Your absence.. not absence. . flight. . has broken my health, and left me fever and frenzy. Eumedes is certain I can only recover my health by composure. Foolish man! as if composure were more easy to recover than health. Was there ever such a madman as to say, "You will never have the use of your limbs again unless you walk and run!"

I am weary of advice, of remonstrance, of pity, of everything; above all, of life.

Was it anger (how dared I be angry with you?) that withheld me from imploring the sight of you? Was it pride? Alas! what pride is left me? I am preferred no longer; I am rejected, scorned, loathed. Was it always so? Well may I ask the question; for everything seems uncertain to me but my misery. At times I know not whether I am mad or dreaming. No, no, Aspasia! the past was a dream, the present is a reality. The mad and the dreaming do not shed tears as I do. And yet in these bitter tears are my happiest moments; and some angry demon knows it, and presses my temples that there shall fall but few.

You refused to admit me. I asked too little, and deserved the refusal. Come to me. This you will not refuse, unless you are bowed to slavery. Go, tell your despot this, with my curses and defiance.

I am calmer, but insist. Spare yourself, Aspasia, one tear, and not by an effort, but by a duty.

XXI. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

Of all men living, what man do you imagine has come to Athens? Insensate! now you know. What other, so beloved, would ever have left Miletus! I wish I could be convinced that your coldness or indifference had urged him to this extravagance. I can only promise you we will not detain him. Athens is not a refuge for the

XXII. ASPASIA TO XENIADES.

I am pained to my innermost heart that you are ill.

Pericles is not the person you imagine him. Behold his billet! And can not you think of me with equal generosity?

True, we saw much of each other in our childhood, and many childish things we did together. This is the reason why I went out of your way as much as I could afterward. There is another too. I hoped you would love more the friend that I love most. How much happier would she make you than the flighty Aspasia ! We resemble each other too much, Xeniades! we should never have been happy, so ill-mated. Nature hates these alliances: they are like those of brother and sister. I never loved anyone but Pericles: none else attracts the admiration of the world. I stand, O Xeniades! not only above slavery, but above splendour, in that serene light which Homer describes as encompassing the Happy on Olympus. I will come to visit you within the hour; be calm, be contented! love me, but not too much, Xeniades !

XXIII. ASPASIA TO PERICLES.

Xeniades, whom I loved a little in my childhood, and (do not look serious now, my dearest Pericles) a very little afterward, is sadly ill. He was always, I know not how, extravagant in his wishes, although not so extravagant as many others; and what do you imagine he wishes now? He wishes. . but he is very ill, so ill he can not rise from his bed,.. that I would go and visit him. I wonder whether it would be quite considerate: I am half inclined to go, if you approve of it.

Poor youth! he grieves me bitterly.

I shall not weep before him; I have wept so much here. Indeed, indeed, I wept, my Pericles, only because I had written too unkindly.

XXIV. PERICLES TO ASPASIA.

Do what your heart tells you: yes, Aspasia, do all it tells you. Remember how august it is: it contains the temple, not only of Love, but of Conscience; and a whisper is heard from the extremity of the one to the extremity of the other.

Bend in pensiveness, even in sorrow, on the flowery bank of youth, whereunder runs the stream that passes irreversibly! let the garland drop into it, let the hand be refreshed by it; but may the beautiful feet of Aspasia stand firm!

XXV. XENIADES TO ASPASIA.

You promised you would return. I thought you only broke hearts, not promises.

It is now broad daylight: I see it clearly, although the blinds are closed. A long sharp ray cuts off one corner of the room, and we shall hear the crash presently.

Come; but without that pale silent girl: I hate her. Place her on the other side of you, not on mine.

And this plane-tree gives no shade whatever. We will sit in some other place.

No, no; I will not have you call her to us. Let her play where she is the notes are low. . she plays sweetly.

XXVI. ASPASIA TO PERICLES.

See what incoherency! He did not write it; not one word. The slave who brought it, told me that he was desired by the guest to write his orders, whenever he found his mind composed enough to give any.

About four hours after my departure, he called him mildly, and said, "I am quite recovered."

He gave no orders however, and spake nothing more for some time. At last he raised himself up, and rested on his elbow, and began (said the slave) like one inspired. The slave added, that finding he was indeed quite well again, both in body and mind, and capable of making as fine poetry as any man in Athens, he had written down every word with the greatest punctuality; and that, looking at him for more, he found he had fallen into as sound a slumber as a reaper's. "Upon this I ran off with the verses," said he.

XXVII. CLEONE TO ASPASIA.

Comfort him. But you must love him, if you do. Well! comfort him. Forgive my inconsiderateness. You will not love him now. You would not receive him when your bosom was without an occupant. And yet you saw him daily. Others, all others, pine away before him. I wish I could solace my soul with poetry, as you have the power of doing. In all the volumes I turn over, I find none exactly suitable to my condition: part expresses my feelings, part flies off from them to something more light and vague. I do not believe the best writers of love-poetry ever loved. How could they write if they did? where could they collect the thoughts, the words, the courage? Alas! alas! men can find all these, Aspasia, and leave us after they have found them. But in Xeniades there is no fault whatever he never loved me: he never said he did he fled only from my immodesty in loving him. Dissembler as I was, he detected it. Do pity him, and help him but pity me too, who am beyond your help.

:

XXVIII. PERICLES TO ASPASIA.

Tears, O Aspasia, do not dwell long upon the cheeks of youth. Rain drops easily from the bud, rests on the bosom of the maturer flower, and breaks down that one only which hath lived its day.

Weep, and perform the offices of friendship. The season of life, leading you by the hand, will not permit you to linger at the tomb of the departed; and Xeniades, when your first tear fell upon it, entered into the number of the blessed.

XXIX. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

What shall I say to you, tender and sweet Cleone! The wanderer is in the haven of happiness; the restless has found rest.

Weep not; I have shed all your tears. . not all. . they burst from me again.

XXX. CLEONE TO ASPASIA.

Oh! he was too beautiful to live! Is there any thing that shoots through the world so swiftly as a sunbeam! Epialtes has told me everything. He sailed back without waiting at the islands; by your orders, he says.

What hopes could I, with any prudence, entertain? The chaplet you threw away would have cooled and adorned my temples; but how could he ever love another who had once loved you? I am casting my broken thoughts before my As pasia: the little shells upon the shore, that the storm has scattered there, and that heedless feet have trampled on.

I have prayed to Venus; but I never prayed her to turn toward me the fondness that was yours. I fancied, I even hoped, you might accept it; and my prayer was, "Grant I may never love! Afar from me, O Goddess! be the malignant warmth that dries up the dews of friendship."..

XXXI. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

Pericles has insisted on it that I should change the air, and has recommended to me an excursion to the borders of the state.

"If you pass them a little way," said he, "you will come to Tanagra, and that will inflame you with ambition."

The honour in which I hold the name of Corinna induced me to undertake a journey to her native place. Never have I found a people so hos pitable as the inhabitants. Living at a distance from the sea, they are not traders, nor adventurers, nor speculators, nor usurers, but cultivate a range of pleasant hills, covered with vines. Hermes is the principal God they worship; yet I doubt whe ther a single prayer was ever offered up to him by a Tanagrian for success in thievery.

The beauty of Corinna is no less celebrated than her poetry. I remarked that the women speak of it with great exultation, while the men applaud her genius; and I asked my venerable host Agesilaus how he could account for it.

"I can account for nothing that you ladies do" said he although I have lived among you seventy

five years: I only know that it was exactly the contrary while she was living. We youths were rebuked by you when we talked about her beauty; and the rebuke was only softened by the candid confession, that she was clever.. in her way." "Come back with me to Athens, O Agesilaus!" said I, "and we will send Aristophanes to Tanagra."

XXXII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

I have been reading all the poetry of Corinna that I could collect. Certainly it is better than Hesiod's, or even than Myrtis's, who taught her and Pindar, not the rudiments of the art, for this is the only art in which the rudiments are incommunicable, but what was good, what was bad, in her verses; why it was so, and how she might correct the worse and improve the better.

Hesiod, who is also a Boeotian, is admirable for the purity of his life and soundness of his precepts, but there is hardly a trace of poetry in his ploughed field.

I find in all his writings but one verse worth transcribing, and that only for the melody:

"In a soft meadow and on vernal flowers."

I do not wonder he was opposed to Homer. What an advantage to the enemies of greatness (that is, to mankind) to be able to match one so low against one so lofty!

The Greek army before Troy would have been curious to listen to a dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles, but would have been transported with ecstasy to have been present at one between the king of men and Thersites.

There are few who possess all the poetry of any voluminous author. I doubt whether there are ten families in Athens in which all the plays of Eschylus are preserved. Many keep what pleases them most: few consider that every page of a really great poet has something in it which distinguishes him from an inferior order: something which, if insubstantial as the aliment, serves at least as a solvent to the aliment, of strong and active minds.

I asked my Pericles what he thought of Hesiod. "I think myself more sagacious," said he. "Hesiod found out that half was more than all; I have found out that one is."

XXXIII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

A slave brought to me, this morning, an enormous load of papers, as many as he could carry ander both arms. They are treatises by the most celebrated philosophers. Some hours afterward, when the sun was declining, Pericles came in, and asked me if I had examined or looked over any portion of them. I told him I had opened those only which bore the superscription of famous names, but that, unless he would assist me, I was hopeless of reconciling one part with another in

the same writers.

66

many as are now at Athens should meet together, and agree upon a nomenclature of terms. From definitions we may go on to propositions; but we can not make a step unless the foot rests somewhere." He smiled at me. "Ah my Aspasia !" said he, Philosophy does not bring her sons together; she portions them off early, gives them a scanty stock of worm-eaten furniture, a chair or two on which it is dangerous to sit down, and at least as many arms as utensils; then leaves them they seldom meet afterward."

"But could not they be brought together by some friend of the mother?" said I, laughing.

66

Aspasia!" answered he, "you have lived but few years in the world, and with only one philosopher. . yourself."

"I will not be contented with a compliment," said I," and least of all from you. Explain to me the opinions of those about you."

He traced before me the divergencies of every sect, from our countryman Thales to those now living. Epimedea sat with her eyes wide open, listening attentively. When he went away, I asked her what she thought of his discourse. She half closed her eyes, not from weariness, but (as many do) on bringing out of obscurity into light a notable discovery; and, laying her forefinger on my arm, "You have turned his head," said she. "He will do no longer; he used to be plain and coherent; and now . . did ever mortal talk so widely? I could not understand one word in twenty, and what I could understand was sheer nonsense."

"Sweet Epimedea!" said I, "this is what I should fancy to be no such easy matter."

"Ah! you are growing like him already," said she; "I should not be surprised to find, some morning, a cupola at the top of this pretty head."

Pericles, I think I never told you, has a little elevation on the crown of his; I should rather say his head has a crown, others have none.

BB

XXXV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

Prudently have you considered how to preserve all valuable authors. The cedar doors of a royal library fly open to receive them: ay, there they will be safe. . and untouched.

Hiero is however no barbarian: he deserves a higher station than a throne; and he is raised to it. The protected have placed the protector where neither the malice of men nor the power of Gods can reach him. . beyond Time. . above Fate.

XXXVI. CLEONE TO ASPASIA.

From the shortness of your last, I am quite certain that you are busy for me in looking out pieces of verse. If you cannot find any of Myrtis or Corinna, you may do what is better; you may compose a panegyric on all of our sex who have excelled in poetry. This will earn for you the same good office, when the world shall produce another Aspasia.

Having been in Boeotia, you must also know a great deal more of Pindar than we do. Write about any of them; they all interest me; and my mind has need of exercise. It is still too fond of throwing itself down on one place.

XXXVII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

And so, Cleone, you wish me to write a eulogy on Myrtis and Corinna, and all the other poetesses that ever lived; and this is for the honour of our sex! Ah Cleone! no studied eulogy does honour to anyone. It is always considered, and always ought to be, as a piece of pleading, in which the pleader says everything the most in favor of his client, in the most graceful and impressive manner he can. There is a city of Greece, I hear, in which reciprocal flattery is so necessary, that, whenever a member of the assembly dies, his successor is bound to praise him before he takes the seat.

I do not speak this from my own knowledge; indeed I could hardly believe in such frivolity, until I asked Pericles if it were true; or rather, if there were any foundation at all for the report. "Perfectly true," said he, "but the citizens of this city are now become our allies; therefore do not curl your lip, or I must uncurl it, being an archon."

Myrtis and Corinna have no need of me. To read and recommend their works, to point out their beauties and defects, is praise enough.

"How!" methinks you exclaim. "To point out defects! is that praising?"

Yes, Cleone; if with equal good faith and accuracy you point out their beauties too. It is only thus a fair estimate can be made; and it is only by such fair estimate that a writer can be exalted to his proper station. If you toss up the

equipoise; what it contains drops out, and people catch at it, scatter it, and lose it.

We not only are inclined to indulge in rather more than a temperate heat (of what we would persuade ourselves is wholesome severity) toward the living, but even to peer sometimes into the tomb, with a wolfish appetite for an unpleasant odor.

We must patronise, we must pull down; in fact, we must be in mischief, men or women.

If we are capable of showing what is good in another, and neglect to do it, we omit a duty; we omit to give rational pleasure, and to conciliate right good-will; nay more, we are abettors, if not aiders, in the vilest fraud, the fraud of purloining from respect. We are entrusted with letters of great interest; what a baseness not to deliver them!

XXXVIII, ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

It is remarkable that Athens, so fertile in men of genius, should have produced no women of distinction, while Boeotia, by no means celebrated for brightness of intellect in either sex, presented to the admiration of the world her Myrtis and Corinna. At the feet of Myrtis it was that Pindar gathered into his throbbing breast the scattered seeds of poetry; and it was under the smile of the beautiful Corinna that he drew his inspiration and wove his immortal crown.

He never quite overcame his grandiloquence. The animals we call half-asses, by a word of the sweetest sound, although not the most seducing import, he calls

"The daughters of the tempest-footed steeds!"

O Fortune! that the children of so illustrious a line should carry sucking-pigs into the marketplace, and cabbage-stalks out of it!

XXXIX. CLEONE TO ASPASIA.

Will you always leave off, Aspasia, at the very moment you have raised our expectations to the highest? A witticism, and a sudden spring from your seat, lest we should see you smile at it, these mined to continue all your life in making everyone are your ways; shame upon you! Are you deterwish something?

Pindar should not be treated like ordinary

men.

XL. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

I have not treated Pindar like an ordinary man; I conducted him into the library of Cleone, and left him there. However, I would have my smile out, behind the door. The verse I quoted, you may be sure, is much admired by the learned, and no less by the brave and worthy men whom he celebrates for charioteership, and other such dexterities; but we of old Miletus have been always taught that words should be subordinate