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garb of human servitude; such from be- the spontaneousness, the absence of selfginning to end is the thought of the Synop-analysis, the unconsciousness of all power, tists. Theirs is the worship of a strength and the ignorance of all merit, which are which is strong by becoming weak, the the essential attributes of the spirit of reverence of a life which is individually childhood. He declares that the revelagreat by losing its own individuality and living in the lives of others. They find heroism precisely in those qualities whose opposites had been the worship of the Asiatic intellect. They assign a kingdom to poverty of spirit, an increase of knowledge to the increase of sorrow, an earthly empire to the power of gentleness, a perfect satisfaction to the hungering and thirsting of the soul. They see a higher triumph in the peace-maker than in the war-maker, a superior strength in the power of forgiveness to that which dwells in the capacity for vengeance. They find the most promising subjects of the new kingdom precisely in those whom the Asiatic intellect would have passed over -in the laboring, the heavy-laden, the consciously weak, and poor, and needy. We need not say that an ideal such as this was the antagonist and the subversion of the worship of physical power. So far from being created by that worship, it could only begin to exist in its decay and death. It grew out of another order of thought, it was the product of a contrary element, and the element which produced it was foreign, not only to the mind of Judea, but to the entire genius of the Asiatic intellect.

If we pass now to the Platonic ideal, we shall find ourselves equally unable to discover in the natural growth of heathendom an explanation of the Christian portraiture. The Platonist, as we have seen, aspired to the consciousness of intellectual power; it was the sense of this intellectual superiority which constituted his sense of empire over the common herd of men. It is

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tion which he came to communicate appeals, not to those faculties which are developed in the few, but precisely to that part of our nature which potentially exists in all men: "I thank thee, O Father, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." He affirms that while there must be degrees of superiority, the heights to which a man rises will be proportionate to his unconsciousness of his own elevation; and he illustrates the thought by acting the very striking parable of placing a little. child in the midst of the disciples. He makes the highest of moral qualities not self-reliance, but that which is its contrary - faith, the trusting in another. They who would follow him have to leave their all. A man's all is not necessarily his property; or, to speak more correctly, his property is not necessarily his outward possessions; it is whatever he believes to be the source of his peculiar strength. To become a follower of the Master was therefore to relinquish whatever a man had grasped as the strong point of his nature. It was to subside from self-reliance into absolute dependence, from conscious strength into conscious weakness, from the walk by sight into the walk by faith. It was to forget those points of intellectual superiority which may have separated him from his brethren, and to lay hold of those points of human insufficiency which by one common sense of need linked his individual life to the lives of all mankind; the ideal of Christianity was the death of the ideal of Platonism.

Nor can the conception of Christ's charnot too much to say that in this aspect acter be referred with any greater plausi also the ideal which floated before the bility to the third standard of heathen mind of the Christian was a complete perfection. That standard was, as we reversal of heathen aspirations. The have seen, the attempt to reach æsthetic founder of Christianity is also contem- culture by the contemplation of natural plated as recognizing degrees of mental and physical beauty. It is a notorious superiority, and as assigning to such de- fact that to the mind of the first Christians grees of superiority a proportionate place those beauties which form the prerogative in his kingdom. But the mental superi- of the poet and the artist were rather obority desired by the Christian founder is jects of aversion than of contemplation. not that of intellectual self-consciousness, It is quite certain that they believed this but something which as nearly as possible special form of æsthetic culture to be at is the antithesis of such a feeling. The variance with their religion, and it is condition of membership in Christ's king- equally certain that they were wrong in so dom is the death of self-consciousness, believing. Yet the very fact that the first intellectual or moral. He demands as a Christians should have conceived such an preliminary requisite the possession of a child-life. He insists upon the simplicity,

impression indicates that the religion of Christ must have introduced them to an

other phase of aesthetic culture. truth is that Christianity had brought into from desire The human blessedness to be the emancipation the world a new estimate of the beautiful temptation, and temptation was the source - desire was the source of by the introduction of a new law of associa- of pain. With what a startling power of tion. It had succeeded in uniting the contrast does the Christian ideal burst thought of symmetry with that which hith- upon our view! erto had been unsymmetrical, in attach- by the Spirit to be tempted in the wilder"Then was Jesus led up ing the idea of harmony to that which ness." hitherto had been unharmonious. The more deeply we analyze the Paul said that he gloried in the cross, he impressed with the radical difference of When meaning of these words, the more are we expressed more than the common faith of their standpoint from that of the Buddhist Christendom; he indicated the common religion. Here is a being who is supposed assent of Christendom to a new associa- to have actually reached the blessedness tion of the beautiful- an association which of divine communion. to the heathen mind appeared the wildest opened to his vision, and the voice of The heavens have of paradoxes-the union of glory and heaven has sounded in his ear, "This is pain. Christ was himself the personifica- my beloved Son, in whom I am well tion of the new æsthetic ideal. He unites pleased." Yet this Nirvana of rest, which in one act the hitherto opposite elements to Buddha would have been the goal, is to of glory and of shame. He looks forward Christ only the beginning. He is led up to the hour of deepest human frailty as the from the paradise into the wilderness, into hour in which the Son of Man should be the world of desires and temptations, simglorified. He declares on the road to ply in order that he may experience these Emmaus that the disharmony was an es- desires and encounter these temptations; sential part of the beauty, that Christ must and as if to make the contrast more needs have suffered that he might enter marked, he is "led up by the Spirit." into his glory. He stands under the shad- The struggle with worldly influences, so ow of the cross, and bequeaths to the far from being, as Buddha held, a barrier world his peace; he confronts the specta- to the religious life, is declared to be itself cle of death, and speaks of the fulness of the highest manifestation of that life, the his joy. Nay, this æsthetic connection evidence of its existence, and the proof of between the cross and the crown, between its power. From the manger to the cross, the Calvary and the Olivet of human life, from the wilderness to the garden, we are is carried out to a still further length by confronted by one pervading thought — the minds of his disciples. As if to find the possible glory of human suffering, and the longest possible bridge between the the potential gain that resides in human extremes of human thought, they actually loss; and we are constrained as we survey rise to the conception of Christ as the high the picture, whatever be our estimate of priest in heaven. They are not afraid to its dogmatic value, to assign to it the merit enter within the veil, they are not afraid to of genuine originality. introduce within the veil the thought of sacrifice and the memory of human pain; in which heathendom agreed with Judaism, The last ideal of heathendom, and that heaven and earth never met so closely to- was the reverence for regal majesty, the gether as in that association of sacrificial desire of a kingdom. Now, let us obsorrow with spiritual joy. The apologetic serve that, in the abstract, Christ was at importance of this association it is hardly one with this desire. Lord Amberley, in possible to overrate; it is, if we mistake his "Analysis of Religious Belief," has not, that which above all other things found in Christ's abstinence from earthly stamps the character of Christ with its greatness a parallel to the saying of Confuimpress of originality. The founder of cius, that there are three desirable objects, Buddhism has been thought to come near- and that the possession of empire is not er to him than any other ideal of antiquity; one of them. Lord Amberley has alto. but it is just here that the founder of Bud-gether missed the beauty and the freshdhism is further behind him than all. ness of the Christian paradox. The ChiBuddha longed for death, and taught his followers to long for death; but why? Because the sufferings of life were too strong for him. The notion of a world redeemed through a cross, and perfected through suffering, was at the last possible remove either from his teaching or his thought. Buddha considered the goal of

nese philosopher meant to state that a man might be perfectly happy though his lot were obscure and his influence insignificant; Christ would certainly have conceded the platitude, but he would not have thought it worthy to be the subject of a special revelation. in the mind of the Master is not the abThe leading thought

stract undesirableness of empire, but the | contrary. Empire in its deepest sense is the influence of mind over mind, and Christ professes expressly to establish such an influence. He adopts a principle of natural selection, by which the saints shall judge the world; in other words, by which the best shall rule. He declares his mission to be the establishment of a kingdom, the introduction of a new government into the affairs of men, the domination of worldly views by spiritual forces now despised and disregarded. To this extent he is at one with the Roman and at one with the Jew; he believes men, as isolated individuals, to be incapable of action, and he longs to see them united as the servants of a theocratic power, whose will shall be their law, and whose law shall be their will. But at this point the master parts company with the Roman and the Jew, and strikes off into a path which had been hitherto untrodden. He agreed with them in their desire of a kingdom; he differed from them radically in their mode of realizing it. The Roman and the Jew sought to dominate men from without; they strove after an empire which should be won by physical weapons and maintained by physical power. Christ objected to this imperialism, not, as Lord Amberley thinks, because it was a source of human greatness, but because it was not a source of human greatness, because, in the strictest sense of the word, it was not a king dom at all. He felt, and felt truly, that any empire which, like the Jewish and the Roman, claimed to be theocratic, could only be made permanent by ruling from within, that nothing could be called a sacred sovereignty which did not directly influence the mind. He felt that the ultimate seat of regal authority lay in the heart of a people, that the heart could only be won by love, and that love could only be manifested by sacrifice. It was from this thought, or train of thought, that there emerged the great Christian paradox, "He that is least shall be greatest." To be a king in the most absolute sense was to be ruler over the heart; but to be ruler over the heart, it was first necessary that the sovereign should be a subject. He who would win the love of others must first be dominated by the love of others; captivity must precede captivation. Inspired by this deep principle of morality, the master conceived the grand design of establishing a kingdom that could never be moved - a kingdom not based upon the physical power which was perishable, nor even on the intellectual Platonic power

which could only exist through the igno-
rance of the many, but on a power whose
foundation was the nature of humanity
itself the capacity for love.
He pro-
posed to conquer the heart of the world,
and to conquer it by the exhibition of his
own heart. The founders of previous
kingdoms had sought to rule by placing in
the foreground the display of their person-
al superiority; the founder of Christianity
resolved to subjugate mankind by the sac-
rifice of himself. The kings of former
time had fought their way to empire by
shedding the blood of their enemies; the
aspirant to this new kingdom determined
to secure dominion by shedding his own.

An aim so strange, a plan so paradoxical, would alone have been sufficient to mark out Christianity from all foregoing forms of faith, but to this there must be added another element which heightens the strangeness and completes the contrast. It is now a historical fact that the founder of Christianity has succeeded in his aim; whatever be mythical in the Gospel, there is no mythology here. There is at this hour in the world the nucleus of such a kingdom as Christ desired to found. We mean not the kingdom of the Roman hierarchy, or the kingdom of the Anglican Church, or the kingdom of the Presbyterian worship, but that which at once underlies and overlaps them allthe loyalty of a multitude of souls to Him who is their ideal of perfection. For let it be remembered that Christianity is not primarily, nor even chiefly, a collection of moral precepts intended for the guidance of human life. If that were all, it would be easy to find occasional parallels between the maxims of Jesus and the maxims of Buddha, or Confucius, or Lao-Tze. But Christianity is what Buddhism and Confucianism and Taoism are not the membership in a kingdom, and the loyalty to a king. It contemplates in the first instance, not the special sayings of its founder, nor yet the sum of his united teaching; it contemplates the founder himself, and fixes its eye upon him alone. Christianity includes all the precepts of morality, but all the precepts of morality united are not the essence of the Christian faith, and simply for this reason, that the Christian religion is a faith. It is the subjection of the heart to an ideal whom it adores, the captivation of the eye by a portrait in which it revels, the conquest of the will by a law which it loves; Christianity in its deepest nature is an æsthetic belief, the vision of a beautiful life, and the conviction that this beauty has become

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These lovers of songs- they may not care for history, and are very likely quite ignorant of Herrick's life and Jonson'swill not want to hear much about the song

by its union with humanity the atonement | record of the manifold life of a thousand for human deformity. There is within years has been made into a book, and has this world an actually existing kingdom of lost some of its vitality in the making. Christ, the hearts of whose subjects are There is plenty of question about the dif ever bowing down before him; and amidst ferent anthologies, and some little about all the changes in the systems of human the separate authors and their poems. government, amidst all the transmutations But, on the other hand, poetry-lovers, and in the aspects of theological thought, this specially lovers of songs, hardly know how great ideal has found no diminution in his many of their favorites are there in original power and reign. The question is, does form. English people who love Herrick and the ideal represent a reality? and the an- Ben Jonson do not all know that Meleager swer to that question depends on the an- was in love with daffodils, and wrote about swer to another. Has the ideal of Chris- the wreath he made of them very much as tendom sprung from a reality, has it grown Herrick would have done; that Agathias out of the natural instincts of the human as good as wrote " Drink to me only with mind, or does it involve something which thine eyes" (the first verse of it at least, the human mind has displayed no ability and the second is to be found unfathered to create? That is the question which in in the fifth book of the "Anthology these pages we have been endeavoring to too); and that, to speak in reverse order answer, and we seem to have arrived at of time, Mrs. Browning and Shakespeare the only possible answer. If we find and Spenser can all be quoted in it. There Judea reaping where she has not sown, are epigrams with the stamp of each upon and gathering where she has not strewed; the face of them. if we see her the birthplace of an idea which surpassed her power of origination, and when originated surpassed her power of comprehension; if in her contact with the Gentile nations we fail to discover writers themselves; and there is not much any germs from which that idea could have naturally sprung; if we find it in essence and in portraiture directly at variance with all heathen aspirations, reversing the world's ideal of physical strength, transforming its estimate of mental power, casting into the shade its conception of æsthetic culture, and placing on a contrary basis its hope of a theocratic kingdom; if we find it introducing a new standard of heroism which caused every valley to be exalted, and every mountain to be made low; and if, above all, we perceive that when that standard of heroism rose upon the world, it rose upon a foreign soil which received it as an alien and an adversary, are we not driven to ask if even on the lowest computation we have not reached the evidence of a new life in humanity, the outpouring of a fresh vitality, and the manifestation of a higher power? GEORGE MATHESON.

From The Nineteenth Century. CHRYSANTHEMA GATHERED FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY.

to tell. "Herrick" and "Jonson" are to them respectively the names of a good many and a few well-known and well-loved verses, and so should Callimachus, for instance, and Agathias, and of course Meleager be; and that would be a great deal better fame for these poets than that students only should know about them as represented by certain numbers in the great drift-heap of the "Anthology." Plato and Simonides have their better fame elsewhere, and are not in such risk of being laid by. This, then, is what I want to give some readable little English poems written to all intents and purposes a great while ago in Greek. An accurate recognition of each poet as an individual cannot perhaps be made out of the original language, scarcely even there; but just as Keats by his temperament met Homer half-way in Chapman, lovers of the Elizabethan poets and of modern poetry, as well as Greek scholars or better, can meet these very men with their sweethearts and their garlands "in their habit as they lived" so many hundred years gone by.

Now, for us to do this with ease and pleasure, we must meet them under some guise familiar to us and not dull. This brings us to the question of metres. With

PERHAPS Scholars have heard and read quite enough about the "Greek Anthology." It has become historical, as all collected poems do, a storehouse not unlocked *The references throughout are to the "Anthologia unless to group or edit the contents; this | Palatina" (instruxit Fred. Dübner, Paris, 1864).

sonnet, as I shall hope to show in one or two examples by-and-by.

To rondels and other "moulds," so to speak, for English verse, we are not accustomed. I am afraid, if I were to try these, I should not be simple enough for a translator. The charm of a rondel is its artificial grace, delighting the eye and ear. The charm of a translation in verse is that the verse should neither load the sense nor tangle it. So I have not inserted any rondels, the most delicate webs of love-song possible.

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We need not hesitate over the story of the “ Anthology” as it has come down to us; Mr. Symonds has made it all interesting already, and what matters to us is that we have the poems in their original form. Being fugitive pieces, they will speak for themselves. We don't want to say, "Now all this was a man's diathesis, and here is his heartbeat," but "Here is this man's heartbeat: judge his diathesis."

our ears accustomed to such a great num- | ber of lyric forms, we must have variety above all else. For different subjects we want different keys and different time as in music. We have a strong instance of this in Tennyson's work. For the monotone of sorrow he takes one grave metre, but in "Maud," where the movement is as complex as life's, he varies the metres to correspond with it as best may be. The translator who would use one metre for these Greek epigrams, would have written "Maud" in couplets. Hexameters and pentameters and occasional iambics are the metres of the "Anthology," but they are not familiar to us and never will be, unless combined with rhyme (and always the more rhyme the better), when they present as good a means as can be found for faithful and rhythmical translations; and heroic couplets which to us take the place of the longer lines to the Greek ear are generally dull. There is no denying that. Take up any book of unbroken The first collection that was made of couplets, and it will certainly prove less Greek epigrams was Meleager's, just beinviting than it could possibly have done tore the Christian era, and his way of in any other form, blank verse included. collecting them is quite the most charmIt is true that in English literature heroicing of all. He gathers the songs into a couplets do best clothe the epigram; but then we must bear this in mind what is nearest to our sympathies in the work of these so-called "epigrammatic" poets is not, as we now speak, epigrammatic at all. Many of the verses are rhetorical exercises, jokes and so forth; but even of these (as Mr. Symonds has shown in his "Greek Poets ") most, though they have the point of an epigram, have not its sting. Meleager's "wreath of songs was a collection of lyrics, most of them short and nearly all memorable, but their incisiveness is very different from the precision we look for in an epigram; they are not forced or witty, many of them just idylls. In our English with its wide vocabulary, and if he had been writing for print and not for graving, it is not perhaps imperti: nent to suppose that he and his fellows, if not his predecessors, would have chosen the sonnet form. For the sonnet with its beautiful order, its strict rules, any one of which broken is an offence to the cultivated ear, and with the manifold changes of tone, the simplicity and the neatness which it admits, is really our best equivalent for the eight or ten hexameters and pentameters in which most of our favorite Greek epigrams are contained. As it is, a translator cannot render these into sonnets without a little undue expansiveness; but where the epigram is of fourteen lines or even twelve, he may fairly cast it into a

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wreath, as he calls it, giving to each poet a symbolic flower; and though he gives all sorts of flowers, for health, and rest, and pleasuring, he gives no poppy to any one, which we must take to mean that they are none of them dull. This is how he introduces them: I have put the preface into blank verse, to preserve the quantities for any one who cares to read it, not because among so many names strange to us we can hope to see all the pretty touches of the poem.

For whom the fruitage of this strain, my muse,
And who among the bards hath made this

wreath?

Meleager wove it, and his weaving gives
For keepsake to most noble Diocles.
And white lilies of Moro, many an one,
Here many lilies are of Anyte,
And Sappho's flowers-so few but roses all-
And daffodils of Melanippides
Heavy with ringing hymns- and thy young
branch,

Vine of Simonides, and twisted in
Nossis, thine iris flower that breathes of myrrh,
And in its tablets are Love's stores of wax.
Herewith, Rhianus' scented marjoram,
And the sweet crocus of Erinna too
Clear as the girl's own skin- and hyacinth,
And a dark spray of Samius' laurel-tree,
Alcæus' hyacinth that speaks to bards-
Fresh ivy-clusters of Leonidas,
And foliage of Mnesalcus' needled pine.
And from the plane-tree song of Pamphilus
He cut a branch, and with the walnut boughs

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