Greek fatalist to modern England,
and to conduct him to church upon a Sunday morning. But Mimnermus is
impenitent. He confesses that the preacher is right when he says that
all earthly pleasures are fugitive. He has always confessed as much at
home under the olive tree; it was because they were fugitive that he
clung to them:

_All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh! the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die_.

There is perhaps no modern book of verse in which a certain melancholy
phase of ancient thought is better reproduced than in _Ionica_, and
this gives its slight verses their lasting charm. We have had numerous
resuscitations of ancient manners and landscape in modern poetry
since the days of Keats and Andre Chenier. Many of these have been so
brilliantly successful that only pedantry would deny their value. But
in _Ionica_ something is given which the others have not known how
to give, the murmur of antiquity, the sigh in the grass of meadows
dedicated to Persephone. It seems to help us to comprehend the little
rites and playful superstitions of the Greeks; to see why Myro built a
tomb for the grasshopper she loved and lost; why the shining hair of
Lysidice, when she was drowned, should be hung up with songs of
pity and reproach in the dreadful vestibule of Aphrodite. The noisy
blasphemers of the newest Paris strike the reader as Christian
fanatics turned inside out; for all their vehemence they can never
lose the experience of their religious birth. The same thing is true
of the would-be Pagans of a milder sensuous type. The Cross prevailed
at their nativity, and has thrown its shadow over their conscience.
But in the midst of the throng there walks this plaintive poet of
the _Ionica_, the one genuine Pagan, absolutely untouched by the
traditions of the Christian past. I do not commend the fact; I merely
note it as giving a strange interest to these forlorn and unpopular
poems.

Twenty years after the publication of _Ionica_, and when that little
book had become famous among the elect, the author printed at
Cambridge a second part, without a title-page, and without
punctuation, one of the most eccentric looking pamphlets I ever
saw. The enthusiastic amateur will probably regard his collection
incomplete without _Ionica II_., but he must be prepared for a
disappointment. There is a touch of the old skill here and there, as
in such stanzas as th