ARISTOTLE.
THE HYMN TO VIRTUE.
“O sought with many toils and strife
By those of mortal race,
Virtue, thou noblest prize of life,
Whose love in us finds such deep place;
Thy beauteous form, O Maid, to gain,
'Twere deem'd in Greece an envied lot to die;
And fiery toils unwearied to sustain;
For fruit which thou dost bear is Immortality.
“Better than gold, ancestral ties,
Or sleep's soft-vision'd eye;
For whom the Jove-born Hercules,
And Leda's sons in labours vie;
Pursuing while it seem'd to flee
The power that is with thee, of suffering bred;
Achilles too in longings after thee,
And Ajax sought for thee the chambers of the dead.
“Atarnæ's nursling, great and good,
For thy dear beauty's sake,
Hath turn'd our sun to widowhood,
Such mourning doth his dying make:
Him shall the immortals praise and love,
The Muses, daughters of Mnemosyne,
For honour paid to hospitable Jove,
And Friendship's guerdon built on stedfast constancy.”
ON THE FOREGOING, AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE ETHICS.
So spake the Stagyrite,—mysterious Hymn,
Breathing deep pregnant thought! yet oh, how dim
And powerless, to embody the full soul
Of one that yearn'd for that supernal goal,
Where man may find a resting-place with God!
Clear as with pointing hand or guiding rod
Did Virtue thither shew that middle road;
Yet well he knew of that serene abode,
That neither Jove-born Hercules, nor those
The sons of Leda, who endur'd such woes,—
Nor Peleus' son nor Ajax, who in quest
Of thee to Hades went in his unrest,—
Nor that Atarnæ's offspring, whom he mourn'd,—
Full well he knew those chiefs by fame adorn'd,
Knew not that glorious essence which he sought.
The substance empyrèal of his thought
Was too transcendent, of too heavenly mould
To have been grasp'd by them whose prowess bold
With feats of arm'd achievements fills the earth,
Oft multiplying ills and nothing worth.
But yet such names, by suffering glorified,
As emblems serv'd and shadowy types, allied
To that pure archetype which fill'd his thought,
Amid the things of men that come to nought:—
Which after mortal labour gives repose,
Whose shadow haunts our being till its close,
A crown invisible that mocks our toil,
Yet beckons us to follow: in the coil
Of labours difficult still seems to flee,
And beckons on to immortality
,
Still promises yet gives not, flies from view,
And turns in death that promise to renew.
