XIX.
ON READING THEOCRITUS.
I
A thrill comes o'er us when we view the page
Character'd with the forms of ancient speech;
Gray world-worn fragments of Man's heritage
The years have spared to aid us and to teach.
Where are the hands that framed these golden lines,
Rich in the fragrance of o'erwhelming love;
The passionate sweetness of the tuberose bells:
Sweetness, that song refines
Till earth-born passion spreads her wing above,
And Venus yields her to her own sweet spells?
II
The soul of the Sicilian lives in song:
His name yet flits among the mouths of men:
His dust is heap'd amidst the nameless throng,
Who laugh'd, and wept, and smiled, and wept again,
Man's common lot, as childhood's. Where are they?
They are incorporate with the teeming earth,
Or blown on currents of the viewless air:—
They are not less a prey
To darkness, than the Bard's own tuneful birth,
One death with Daphnis and Adonis share.
III
Where are the sun-brown shepherds? Where the kine
That low'd their music to those azure skies?
The youthful bands that march'd in order'd line,
To deck them for the songful sacrifice?
The white-wall'd towns of the three-corner'd Isle?
The nodding plumage of the Dorian crest?
The long-drawn annals of a nation's strife?
—The snow-topt lava pile
Still dusks with far-thrown shade the wheat-clad west;
She quickens not her dead to second life.
IV
Alas, that it must be so! And alas
That one long Present sums not human life:
That love must wither as the summer grass,
Blank silence overhush heroic strife!
—Let Nature work her will on glade and field,
Dismantling the green honours of their pride,
And riot in the ravening wilderness:
These to her sway we yield:—
We bid her turn her wrath from man aside,
Sparing him in her wasteful wantonness.
V
We thread the thrilling leaves of ancient song,
High resonant of dance, of wine, of gladness,
By mirth not uncongenial borne along;
But soon gay thoughts dissolve themselves in sadness:
The visions of the mighty dead are here;
Their voices haunt their own immortal lays;
And long-lost faces o'er the pages gleam.
Their presences are near:—
We fail before the spectres that we raise,
The thronging phantoms of a day-tide dream.
