And, casting about
to illustrate, as well as may be, what I mean by this, I hit on a
minor dialogue of Plato, the "Phaedrus," and choose you a short
passage in Edward FitzGerald's rendering:

When Socrates and Phaedrus have discoursed away the noon-day
under the plane trees by the Ilissus, they rise to depart
toward the city. But Socrates (pointing perhaps to some images
of Pan and other sylvan deities) says it is not decent to leave
their haunts without praying to them, and he prays:

'O auspicious Pan, and ye other deities of this place, grant to
me to become beautiful _inwardly,_ and that all my outward
goods may prosper my inner soul. Grant that I may esteem wisdom
the only riches, and that I may have so much gold as temperance
can handsomely carry.

'Have we yet aught else to pray for, Phaedrus? For myself I
seem to have prayed enough.'

_Phaedrus_: 'Pray as much for me also: for friends have all
in common.'

_Socrates_: 'Even so be it. Let us depart'

To this paternoster of Socrates, reported more than four
centuries before Christ taught the Lord's Prayer, let me add an
attempted translation of the lines that close Homer's hymn to the
Delian Apollo. Imagine the old blind poet on the beach chanting
to the islanders the glorious boast of the little island--how it
of all lands had harboured Leto in her difficult travail; how she
gave birth to the Sun God; how the immortal child, as the
attendant goddesses touched his lips with ambrosia, burst his
swaddling bands and stood up, sudden, a god erect:

But he, the Sun-God, did no sooner taste
That food divine than every swaddling band
Burst strand by strand,
And burst the belt above his panting waist--
All hanging loose
About him as he stood and gave command:
'Fetch me my lyre, fetch me my curving bow!
And, taught by these, shall know
All men, through me, the unfaltering will of Zeus!'
So spake the unshorn God, the Archer bold,
And turn'd to tread the ways of Earth so wide;
While they, all they, had marvel to behold
How Delos broke in gold
Beneath his feet, as on a mountain-side
Sudden, in Spring, a tree is glorified
And canopied with blossoms manifold.
But he went swinging with a careless stride,
Proud, in his new artillery bedight,
Up rocky Cynthus, and the isles descried--
All his, and their inhabitants--for wide,
Wide as he roam'd, ran these in rivalry
To build him t