fallen. States live but once. Had I no Aspasia, | no children, I am ignorant what support I could have found against the impulses of ambition. Many who seize upon kingly power, are the more desirous of possessing it because they have sons to succeed them. Imprudent men! they expose those sons to infinite dangers, and create no new advantages for them. If they provided for their security, they would abdicate their power, when about to be taken away by death from those over whom they exercised it. If they provided for their glory, they would not subject them to the reproach, always merited, of possessing less activity and sagacity than their father. Do they care about their wisdom or their virtue? they will not cast them among idlers and sycophants, nor abandon them on a solitary island, where many sing and none discourse. What life is wretcheder? what state more abject?"

Yours, my dear Pericles!" said I "is far happier, but by no means enviable."

"True!" answered he: "I am subject to threats, curses, denunciations, ostracism, and hemlock: but I glory in the glory of the state, and I know that I can maintain it."

I was listening with attention, when he said to me with an air of playfulness,

"Am I not a boaster? am I not proud of my command? am I not over-fond of it, when I am resolved not to transmit it hereditarily to another?" "Rightly judged! dear Pericles!" said I: "you always act judiciously and kindly."

"Political men, like goats," continued he, "usually thrive best among inequalities. I have chosen the meadow; and not on the whole imprudently. My life has been employed in making it more pleasurable, more even, more productive. The shepherds have often quarrelled with me; and but now the sheep too, in their wisdom, turned their heads against me."

CLXIV. ASPASIA TO PERICLES.

I would not disturb you, my beloved Pericles! but let not anything else! Why are you so busy now the danger is over? why do so many come to you, with countenances so earnest when they enter, and so different from composed when they go away? You never break your resolutions, otherwise I should fear they might lead you above the place of fellow citizen. Then farewell happiness, farewell manliness, security, sincerity, affection, honour!

O Pericles! descend from the car of Victory on the course itself. In abandoning power and station, what do you abandon but inquietude and ingratitude?

CLXV. PERICLES TO ASPASIA.

We never alight from a carriage while it is going down a hill, but always at the top or at the bottom. There is less danger in being shaken out than there is in leaping out.

Were I at this juncture to abdicate my authority, I should appear to the people to confess a fault, and to myself to commit one.

I must defend those who would have defended me. Rely on my firmness in all things; on Pericles, one, immutable.

CLXVI. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

Alcibiades will one time or other bring us all into peril by his recklessness and precipitation.

When he heard I was arraigned and Pericles threatened, he ran from house to house among the officers of the army, embraced them, knelt before them, adjured them to save their general from ignominy, his wife from insult, the city from mourning, and themselves from inactivity. He swore that if they would not, he would: that two thousand of the same age, or rather older, would join him and obey him, and that he would throw judges, accusers, applauders, listeners, over the Piræus. Not a soldier did he pass without "The fanatical knaves! I would knock the a kiss, without a pressure of the hand, without heads off all their Mercuries.

We went into the air, and saw Alcibiades walking in the garden. He, not observing us, strode along rapidly, striking with his cane every tree in the alley. When we came up nearer, he was repeating,

Noisy demagogues! I would lead them into the midst of the enemy. . I would drag them on by the ears.. not fifty should return. They in their audacity, impeach Aspasia! they bring tears into the eyes of Pericles! I will bring more into theirs, by holy Jupiter!"

He started at our approach. My husband laid his hands upon the youth's shoulder, and said to him,

"But, Alcibiades! if you do not lead fifty back, where will you leave the captives?"

He sprang to the neck of his guardian, and, turning his face toward me, blushed and whispered, "Did she too hear me?"

a promise; not a girl in Athens that was not his sister, not a matron that was not his mother. Within an hour, in every part of the city there were cries,

"The Lacedæmonians have none of these rogues among them."

"No accusers there no judges there." "Archidamos is wise; Pericles is wiser: shall the one be a king, the other a culprit?"

"Shall his war-horse" cried a soldier " carry panniers?"

"Fore-foot and hind-foot say I" cried another, " against these market-place swine, these blackmuzzled asses!"

"Out upon them! what have they won for us?" cried another.

celebrated city? Must I never fancy I am a Helen while I am bathing in the Eurotas or the Tiasa? I am curious to see their Skeias,* and to compare it with our Hecatompedon. It would interest me the more, because in this edifice the lyre of our countryman Timotheus is suspended. It was forfeited, you know, for his having added four strings. Woe betide those improvident creatures who add anything to our delights! But surely poor Timotheus must have fallen among the poets.

CLXXIII. ASPASIA TO PERICLES.

When the war is over, as surely it must be in another year, let us sail among the islands of the Egæan, and be young as ever. O that it were permitted us to pass together the remainder of our lives in privacy and retirement! This is never to be hoped for in Athens.

I inherit from my mother a small yet beautiful house in Tenos: I remember it well. Water, clear and cold, ran before the vestibule: a sycamore shaded the whole building. I think Tenos must be nearer to Athens than to Miletus. Could we not go now for a few days? How temperate was the air, how serene the sky, how beautiful the country! the people how quiet, how gentle, how kind-hearted!

Is there any station so happy as an uncontested place in a small community, where manners are simple, where wants are few, where respect is the tribute of probity, and love is the guerdon of beneficence. O Pericles! let us go; we can return at any time.

CLXXIV. ANAXAGORAS TO ASPASIA.

by the attempt. Age is coming on. This will not loosen his tenacity of power.. it usually has quite the contrary effect. . but it will induce him to give up more of his time to the studies he has always delighted in, which however were insufficient for the full activity of his mind. Mine is a sluggard: I have surrendered it entirely to philosophy, and it has made little or no progress: it has dwelt pleased with hardly anything it has embraced, and has often run back again from fond prepossessions to startling doubts: it could not help it.

But as we sometimes find one thing while we are looking for another, so, if truth escaped me, happiness and contentment fell in my way, and have accompanied me even to Lampsacos.

Be cautious, O Aspasia ! of discoursing on philosophy. Is it not in philosophy as in love? the more we have of it, and the less we talk about it, the better. Never touch upon religion with anybody. The irreligious are incurable and insensible; the religious are morbid and irritable: the former would scorn, the latter would strangle you. It appears to me to be not only a dangerous, but, what is worse, an indelicate thing, to place ourselves where we are likely to see fevers and phrenzies, writhings and distortions, debilities and deformities. Religion at Athens is like a fountain near Dodona, which extinguishes a lighted torch, and which gives a flame of its own to an unlighted one held down to it. Keep yours in your chamber; and let the people run about with theirs; but remember, it is rather apt to catch the skirts. Believe me, I am happy: I am not deprived of my friends. Imagination is little less strong in our later years than in our earlier. True, it alights on fewer objects, but it rests longer on them, and sees them better. cles first, and then you, and then Meton, occupy my thoughts. I am with you still; I study with you, just as before, although nobody talks aloud in the schoolroom.

Peri

The gratitude and love I owe to Pericles induces me to write the very day I have landed at Lampsacos. You are prudent, Aspasia! and your prudence is of the best quality; instinctive delicacy. But I am older than you, or than Pericles, This is the pleasantest part of life. Oblivion although than Pericles by only six years; and, throws her light coverlet over our infancy; and, having no other pretext to counsel you, will rest soon after we are out of the cradle we forget how upon this. Do not press him to abstain from soundly we had been slumbering, and how delightpublic business: for, supposing he is by nature ful were our dreams. Toil and pleasure contend no obstinate man, yet the long possession of for us almost the instant we rise from it: and authority has accustomed him to grasp the tighter weariness follows whichever has carried us away. what is touched; as shell-fish contract the claws at an atom. The simile is not an elegant one, but I offer it as the most apposite. He might believe that you fear for him, and that you wish him to fear this alone would make him pertinacious. Let everything take its season with him. Perhaps it is necessary that he should control the multitude: if it is, he will know it; even you could not stir him, and would only molest him

We stop awhile, look around us, wonder to find we have completed the circle of existence, fold our arms, and fall asleep again.

CLXXV. ANAXAGORAS TO ASPASIA.

Proxenos, a native of Massilia, is lately come over to visit his relations and correspondents. The Phocæans, you know, were the founders of Lampsacos, long before they were driven by the "It was of a circular form, with a roof like an um- invasion of Cyrus into Italy and Gaul. Like the brella, and erected about 760 years B. C." St. John's generality of mercantile men, Proxenos is little Ancient Greece. The most learned, the most compre-attached to any system of philosophy, but appears hensive, and the most judicious work ever written about the manners, the institutions, and the localities of to hold in some esteem the name and institutions that country. of Pythagoras. Formerly we have conversed

Proxenos is come in by appointment and has broken off an old story which you know as well as I do. I will give you his; but not without an account from you in return, of what is going on among the craft at Athens.

CLXXVI. ASPASIA TO ANAXAGORAS.

The

together with Pericles on this extraordinary man, in devoting his blood at the altar; Ctesibias, on regretting that so little is known of him in the the bosom of his friend. midst of his celebrity. Hardly a century hath elapsed since he left his native Samos, and settled on the peaceful shores of Italy. His presence, his precepts, his authority, his example, were unavailing to the preservation of that tranquillity, which the beauty of the climate, the fertility of the soil, and the freedom of the institutions, ought to have established and perpetuated. But it is in the regions of the earth as in the regions of the air; Secrecy and mystery drive the uninitiated into the warm and genial are absorbed by the cold and suspicion and distrust: an honest man never will void, and tempests and storms ensue. The happi- propose, and a prudent man never will comply ness of thousands is the happiness of too many, with, the condition. What is equitable and proin the close calculation of some inexpert contriver; per lies wide open on the plain, and is accessible and he spoils the honey by smoking the hive. No to all, without an entrance through labyrinth or sooner is a nation at ease, than he who should be defile. I do not love Pythagoras nor Epimenides, the first to participate in the blessing, is the most nor indeed my friend Socrates so much as peruneasy; and, when at last he has found a place to haps I should, who however, beside his cleverness, his mind, before he lies down he scratches a hole has many good qualities. He, like Pythagoras, in it, as the dogs do. Such had been the case at is endowed with an extraordinary share of intel Samos, and such was likewise the case at Croton. lect; but neither of them has attained the fixed The difference lay merely in this. Polycrates was and measured scope of true philosophy: the one a man of abilities, and capable of holding the being in perpetual motion to display his surprisgovernment in his single hand: he loved power, ing tricks of rhetorical ingenuity, which tend only he loved pleasure, he contented the populace, and to the confusion of truth and falsehood, and conhe reconciled the wise: Croton was subject to sequently to indifference in the choice of them; the discretion of an oligarchy, incompetent, arro- the other was no less active and restless in the gant, jealous, and unjust. It is untrue that Py-acquisition and maintenance of power. thagoras was ever at enmity with him, or was business of philosophy is to examine and estimate treated by him with disrespect. The one was as all those things which come within the cognifond of authority as the other, and neither was zance of the understanding. Speculations on any willing to divide it. Whatever could be done to that lie beyond, are only pleasant dreams, leaving promote the studies of the philosopher was done the mind to the lassitude of disappointment. spontaneously by the chief magistrate, who gave They are easier than geometry and dialectics; him letters of recommendation to the king of they are easier than the efforts of a well-regulated Egypt. By these, and perhaps by these only, could imagination in the structure of a poem. These he ever have penetrated into the innermost are usually held forth by them as feathers and recesses of the priesthood. Conversing with them, thistle-down; yet condescend they nevertheless and observing their power over the people, he to employ them; numerals as matter and mind; lost nothing of his inclination to possess the same, harmony as flute and fiddle-strings to the dances and added much to the means of acquiring it. of the stars. In their compositions they adopt Epimenides the Cretan was perhaps the exemplar the phraseology and curtsey to the cadences of he had resolved to follow, but with mitigated poetry. Look nearer; and what do you see before severity. Solon with all his wisdom, and never you? the limbs of Orpheus, bloodless, broker, had mortal more, was unable to bring back the swollen, and palpitating on the cold and misty Athenians to the simplicity and equity of their waters of the Hebrus. Such are the rhapsodical forefathers. Knowing well their propensity to scraps in their visionary lucubrations. They superstition, which always acts with its greatest would poison Homer, the purest and soundest of intensity on the cruel and the loose, he invited moralists, the most ancient and venerable of phiEpimenides to come and overawe them by his losophers, not out of any ill-will to him, but out sanctity and his sacrifices. We can not doubt that of love to the human race. There is often an enhe left the whole management of their conversion chantment in their sentences, by which the ear is to the discretion of the stranger. An Epimenides, captivated, and against which the intellectual in all ages of the world, will possess more influence powers are disinclined to struggle; and there is than a Solon. Lustrations and sacrifices followed sometimes, but very rarely, a simplicity of manprodigies and omens; and among the marvels ner, which wins like truth. But when ambition and miracles which the Cretan seer displayed, the leads them toward the poetical, they fall flat upon last was the greatest in the eyes of Athens. He thorny ground. No writer of florid prose ever announced his determination to return home, and was more than a secondary poet. Poetry, in her refused all the honours and riches the people high estate, is delighted with exuberant abunwould have lavished on him. Epimenides wanted dance, but imposes on her worshipper a severity of nothing the Gods were less moderate; they re-selection. She has not only her days of festival, quired a human victim. Cratinos was too happy but also her days of abstinence, and, unless upon

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