flamboyant than what we became
accustomed to later on. The tone is extremely pensive, sensitive, and
melancholy. But where the author is at his best, he is not only, as
it seems to me, very original, but singularly perfect, with the
perfection of a Greek carver of gems. The book is addressed to and
intended for scholars, and the following piece, although really a
translation, has no statement to that effect. Before I quote it,
perhaps I may remind the ladies that the original is an epigram in the
Greek Anthology, and that it was written by the great Alexandrian
poet Callimachus on hearing the news that his dear friend, the poet
Heraclitus--not to be confounded with the philosopher--was dead.

_They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take_.

No translation ever smelt less of the lamp, and more of the violet
than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English
literature, which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal
regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer
expression of a poet's grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief
mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man's songs, his
"nightingales," are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship,
the reward of one who, in Keats's wonderful phrase, has left "great
verse unto a little clan," the last service for the dead to whom it
was enough to be "unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of
heaven, and few ears." To modern vulgarity, whose ideal of Parnassus
is a tap-room of howling politicians, there is nothing so offensive,
as there is nothing so incredible, as the notion that a poet may
hold his own comrade something dearer than the public. The author of
_Ionica_ would deserve well of his country if he had done no more than
draw this piece of aromatic calamus-root from the Greek waters.

Among the lyrics which are entirely original, there are several not
less exquisite than this memory of Callimachus. But the author is not
very safe on modern ground. I confess that I shudder when I read:

"_Oh, look at his