BEFORE THE CONVENT OF ST. JUST, 1556

From Trench's 'The Story of Justin Martyr and Other Poems,' and in 'Poets and Poetry of Europe.'

Is night, and storms continually roar;

Ye monks of Spain, now open me the door.

Here in unbroken quiet let me fare,

Save when the loud bell startles you to prayer.

Make ready for me what your house has meet,
A friar's habit and a winding-sheet.

A little cell unto my use assign:

More than the half of all this world was mine.

The head that stoops unto the scissors now,
Under the weight of many crowns did bow.

The shoulders on which now the cowl is flung,-
On them the ermine of the Cæsars hung.

I living now as dead myself behold,
And fall in ruins like this kingdom old.

B

THE GRAVE IN THE BUSENTO

Y COSENZA Songs of wail at midnight wake Busento's shore;
O'er the wave resounds the answer, and amid the vortex's roar,

Valiant Goths, like spectres, steal along the banks with hurried pace, Weeping o'er Alaric dead, the best, the bravest of his race.

Ah, too soon, from home so far, was it their lot to dig his grave, While still o'er his shoulders flowed his youthful ringlets' flaxen

wave.

On the shore of the Busento ranged, they with each other vied,
As they dug another bed to turn the torrent's course aside.

In the waveless hollow, turning o'er and o'er the sod, the corpse
Deep into the earth they sank, in armor clad, upon his horse;

Covered then with earth again the horse and rider in the grave:
That above the hero's tomb the torrent's lofty plants might wave.

And, a second time diverted, was the flood conducted back;
Foaming rushed Busento's billows onward in their wonted track.

And a warrior chorus sang, "Sleep with thy honors, hero brave; Ne'er a foot of lucre-lusting Roman desecrate thy grave!"

Far and wide the songs of praise resounded in the Gothic host; Bear them on Busento's billow! bear them on from coast to coast! Translation of A. Baskerville.

VENICE

ENICE, calm shadow of her elder day,

VEN

Still, in the land of dreams, lives fresh and fair;
Where frowned the proud Republic's Lion, there

His empty prison-walls keep holiday.

The brazen steeds that, wet with briny spray,

On yonder church-walls shake their streaming hair,
They are the same no longer-ah! they wear
The bridle of the Corsican conqueror's sway!
Where is the people gone, the kindly race

That reared these marble piles amid the waves,
Which e'en decay invests with added grace?

Not in the brows of yon degenerate slaves
Think thou the traits of their great sires to trace ;-
Go, read them, hewn in stone, on doges' graves!
Translation of Charles T. Brooks.

F

"FAIR AS THE DAY »

AIR as the day that bodes as fair a morrow,
With noble brow, with eyes in heaven's dew,
Of tender years, and charming as the new,
So found I thee, so found I too my sorrow.
Oh, could I shelter in thy bosom borrow,

There most collected where the most unbent!
Oh, would this coyness were already spent,
That aye adjourns our union till to-morrow!

But canst thou hate me? Art thou yet unshaken?
Wherefore refusest thou the soft confession

To him who loves, yet feels himself forsaken ?
Oh, when thy future love doth make expression,
An anxious rapture will the moment waken,
As with a youthful prince at his accession!

From Longfellow's Poets and Poetry of Europe.' Translator anonymous.

TO SCHELLING

S HE not also Beauty's sceptre bearing,

Who holds in Truth's domain the kingly right?
Thou seest in the Highest both unite,
Like long-lost melodies together pairing.

Thou wilt not scorn the dainty motley band,
With clang of foreign music hither faring,

A little gift for thee, from Morning Land;
Thou wilt discern the beauty they are wearing.
Among the flowers, forsooth, of distant valleys,

I hover like the butterfly, that clings

To summer sweets and with a trifle dallies;

But thou dost dip thy holy, honeyed wings,

Beyond the margin of the world's flower-chalice,

Deep, deep into the mystery of things.

From Longfellow's Poets and Poetry of Europe.' Translator anonymous.

VOLUNTARY EXILE

Y RANGING spirit seeks the far and wide,

MY

And fain would soar and ever further soar:
I never long could linger on one shore,
Though Paradise should bloom on every side.
My spirit, sore perplexed and inly tried,

In this short life must often needs deplore
How easy 'tis to leave the homestead door;
But ah, how bitter elsewhere to abide!
Yet whoso hates things base with fervid soul,
Is driven from his country in despair,
When men, grown sordid, seek a sordid goal.
Far wiser then the exile's lot to share,
Than 'midst a folk that plays a childish rôle
The yoke of blind plebeian hatred bear.

Translation of Charles Harvey Genung.

PLATO

(427-347 B. C.)

BY PAUL SHOREY

LATO, the first of philosophers, and the only writer of prose who ranks in the literature of power with the bibles and A supreme poets of the world, was born at Athens in the year 427 B. C., and died in the year 347. His youth was contemporaneous with that fatal Peloponnesian war in which the Athens of Pericles dissipated, in a fratricidal contest, the energies that might have prolonged the flowering season of the Greek genius for another century. His maturity and old age were passed as writer and teacher in the subdued and chastened Athens of the restoration, whose mission it was, as schoolmaster of Greece, to disengage the spirit of Hellenism from local and temporal accidents, and prepare it—not without some loss of native charm - for assimilation by the Hellenistic, the Roman, the modern world. Like his pupil the Stagirite Aristotle, he embraces in the compass of his thoughts the entire experience, and reflective criticism of life, of the Greek race. But because he was an Athenian born, and had nourished his mighty youth on the still living traditions of the great age, he transmits the final outcome of Greek culture to us in no quintessential distillation of abstract formulas, but in vivid dramatic pictures that make us actual participants in the spiritual intoxication, the Bacchic revelry of philosophy, as Alcibiades calls it, that accompanied the most intense, disinterested, and fruitful outburst of intellectual activity in the annals of mankind.

It was an age of discussion. The influence of the French salon on the tone and temper of modern European literature has been often pointed out. But the drawing-room conversation of fine ladies and gentlemen has its obvious limits. In the Athens of Socrates, for the first and last time, men talked with men seriously, passionately, on other topics than those of business or practical politics; and their discussions created the logic, the rhetoric, the psychology, the metaphysic, the ethical and political philosophy of western Europe, and wrought out the distinctions, the definitions, the categories in which all subsequent thought has been cast. The Platonic dialogues are a dramatic idealization of that stimulating soul-communion which Diotima celebrates as the consummation of the right love of the

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beautiful; wherein a man is copiously inspired to declare to his friend what human excellence really is, and what are the practices and the ways of life of the truly good man. And in addition to their formal and inspirational value, they remain, even after the codification of their leading thoughts in the systematic treatises of Aristotle, a still unexhausted storehouse of ideas, which, as Emerson says, "make great havoc of our originalities." This incomparable suggestiveness is due after the genius of Plato-to the wealth of virgin material which then lay awaiting the interpretative ingenuity of these brilliant talkers, and the synoptic eye of the philosopher who should first be able to see the one in the many and the many in the one.

Before the recent transformation of all things by physical science, the experience of the modern world offered little to the generalizing philosophic mind which the Periclean Greek could not find in the mythology, the poetry, the art, the historical vicissitudes, the colonial enterprises, and the picturesquely various political life of his race. Modern science was lacking. But the guesses of the preSocratic poet-philosophers had started all its larger hypotheses, and had attained at a bound to conceptions of evolution which, though unverified in detail, distinctly raised all those far-reaching questions touching the origin and destiny of man and the validity of moral and religious tradition, that exercise our own maturer thought.

The concentration and conscious enjoyment of this rich culture in the intense life of imperial Athens gave rise to new ideals in education, and to the new Spirit of the Age, embodied in the Sophistsor professional teachers of rhetoric and of the art of getting on in the world. Their sophistry consisted not in any positive intention of corruption, but in the intellectual bewilderment of a broad but superficial half-culture, which set them adrift with no anchorage of unquestioned principle or fixed faith in any kind of ultimate reality. They thus came to regard the conflicting religious, ethical, and social ideals of an age of transition merely as convenient themes for the execu tion of dialectical and rhetorical flourishes, or as forces to be estimated in the shrewd conduct of the game of life.

Among these showy talkers moved the strange uncouth figure of Socrates, hardly distinguished from them by the writers of comedy. or by the multitude, and really resembling them in the temporarily unsettling effect, upon the mind of ingenuous youth, of his persistent questioning of all untested conventions and traditions. Two things, in addition to the stoic simplicity of his life, his refusal to accept pay for his teaching, and his ironical affectation of ignorance, especially distinguish his conversation from theirs: First, a persistent effort to clear up the intellectual confusion of the age before logic, by insistence on definitions that shall distinguish essence from accident.