There sits Atrides, grave and great,
Grim king of blood and lust-deeds done,
Caught in the iron wheels of Fate

To hand the curse from sire to son.

A fated race! And who are these

With viper locks and scorpion rods, Dim shades of ruin and disease,

Who float around his household gods?

Alas, for wife and children small:

Blood comes, as from the rosebush bloom; The very dogs about his hall

Are conscious of their master's doom.

Or see the fleet victorious steed

In Pindar's whirlwind sweep along,
To whom a more than mortal meed
Remains, the bard's eternal song.

What are the statues Phidias cast,
But dust between the palms of Fate?
A thousand winters cannot blast

Their leaf; if Pindar celebrate.

Great Hiero, Lord of Syracuse,
Or Theron, chief of Acragas,
These despots wisely may refuse
Record in unending brass.

For Pindar sang the sinewy frame,
The nimble athlete's supple grip;
He gave the gallant horse to fame,
Who passed the goal without a whip,

The coursers of the island kings
Jove-born, magnanimously calm:
When gathered Greece at Elis rings
In pæan of the victor's palm.

Or hear the shepherd bard divine
Transfuse the music of his lay
With echoes from the mountain pine,

And wave-wash from the answering bay.

And all around in pasturing flocks

His goatherds flute with plaintive reeds,

His lovers whisper from the rocks,
His halcyons flit o'er flowery meads:

Where galingale with iris blends
In plumy fringe of lady fern;
And sweet the Dorian wave descends
From topmost Etna's snowbright urn.

Or gentle Arethusa lies,

Beside her brimming fountain sweet, With lovely brow and languid eyes, And river lilies at her feet.

Or listen to the lordly hymn,
The weird Adonis, pealing new,
Full of the crimson twilight dim,
Bathed in Astarte's fiery dew.

In splendid shrine without a breath
The wounded lonely hunter lies;
And who has decked the couch of death?
The sister-spouse of Ptolemies.

We seem to hear a god's lament,
The sobbing pathos of despair;
We seem to see her garments rent,
And ashes in ambrosial hair.

Clouds gather where the mystic Nile,
Seven-headed, stains the ambient deep,

The chidden sun forgets to smile,

Where lilies on Lake Moris sleep.

Slumber and silence cloud the face
Of Isis in gold-ivory shrine,

And silence seems to reach the race
Whose youth was more than half divine.

"Tis gone

- the chords no longer glow;

The bards of Greece forget to sing;

Their hands are numb, their hearts are slow; Their numbers creep without a wing.

Their ebbing Helicons refuse

The droplet of a droughty tide.

The fleeting footsteps of the Muse

We follow to the Tiber side.

The Dorian Muse with Cypris ends;
With Cypris wakes the Latian lyre;
And, sternly sweet, Lucretius blends

Her praise inspired with epic fire.

To thee, my Themmius, amply swells
Rich prelude to her genial power,
Her world-renewing force, which dwells
In man, bird, insect, fish, or flower.

Supremely fair, serenely sweet,

The wondering waves beheld her birth, The power whose regal pulses beat

Through every fiber of the earth.

Why should we tax the gods with woe?
They sit outside, they bear no part;
They never wove the rainbow's glow,
They never built the human heart.

These careless idlers who can blame?
If Chance and Nature govern men:
The universe from atoms came,

And back to atoms rolls again.

As earthly kings they keep their state,
The cup of joy is in their hands;
The war note deepens at their gate,
They hear a wail of hungry lands.

They feast, they let the turmoil drive,
And Nature scorns their fleeting sway:

She ruled before they were alive,

She rules when they are passed away.

Before the poet's wistful face

The flaming walls of ether glow:
He sees the lurid brink of space,
Nor trembles at the gulf below.

He feels himself a foundering bark,
Tossed on the tides of time alone;
Blindly he rushes on the dark,

Nor waits his summons to be gone.

Wake, mighty Virgil, nor refuse

Some glimpses of thy laureled face: VOL. IV.-26