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 jacket, I know him afar; How nice," cry the ladies, "looks yonder Hussar_!"
It needs a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of _Ionica_ is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with purely English landscape he is wonderfully happy.
There is not a jarring image or discordant syllable to break the glassy surface of this plaintive _Dirge_:
_Naiad, hid beneath the bank By the willowy river-side, Where Narcissus gently sank, Where unmarried Echo died, Unto thy serene repose Waft the stricken Anterôs.
Where the tranquil swan is borne, Imaged in a watery glass, Where the sprays of fresh pink thorn Stoop to catch the boats that pass, Where the earliest orchis grows, Bury thou fair Anterôs.