uering spirit of Hellenism spreading
triumphantly from the democracies of Athens and Sparta to the Golden
Gate of imperial Byzantium.

But "imagination, like the Phaeacians' ship, rolls on," and the poet
sings:

In my soul's depths loom many lands ...
And where the heavens mingle with the sea,
A path I seek for a sphere beyond ...

Oceans are crossed, ages are brought forth from the past, and continents
are joined in making the poet's spirit. Finally even Earth becomes too
narrow and the greater universe opens its gates to the ultimate
fatherland, the elements of the world which will at the end absorb the
being of the poet:

Fatherlands! Air and earth and fire and water,
Elements indestructible, beginning
And end of life, first joy and last of mine,
You I shall find again when I pass on
To the grave's calm. The people of the dreams
Within me, airlike, unto air shall pass;
My reason, firelike, unto lasting fire;
My passions' craze unto the billows' madness.

Even my dust-worn body, unto dust;
And I shall be again air, earth, fire, water;
And from the air of dreams, and from the flame
Of thought, and from the flesh that shall be dust,

And from the passions' sea, ever shall rise
A breath of sound like a soft lyre's complaint.

2. THE RETURN

The second collection of _Life Immovable_, entitled "The Return," is
dedicated to the poet's country. It bears under its title the
significant date of 1897, the year of the unfortunate Greco-Turkish war
which ended disastrously for Greece and plunged the nation into despair.
After the defeat, almost the whole world spoke of the Greeks as of a
degenerate people beyond the hope of redemption. The sensitiveness of
the race helped in rendering the gloom of disaster most depressing. For
some time, even the Greeks began to resign themselves to their fate as a
hopeless one. Palamas is one of the first to sound the reveille. He
conceives of his collection of songs as an expression of faith in the
country's future. With perfect love and assurance "he comes to place the
crowns of Art" "dream-made and dream-engraved" upon her shattered
throne....

Only with harmony sublime and pure,
Which, though it rises over time and space,
Turns the world's ears to his native land,
The poet is the greatest patriot.

Nevertheless even the poet's spirit cannot help reflecting the gloom
through which it tries