But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Guérin lead us! Here is another link--José de Herédia, and his jewelled and chiselled sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines the essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."
_Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre même s'use. Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;_
_Et seul le dur métal que l'amour fit docile Garde encore en sa fleur, aux médailles d'argent, L'immortelle beauté des vierges de Sicile."_
Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays; A shadow Agrigentum; Syracuse Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades; But the hard metal guards through all the days, Silver grown docile unto love's own use, The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids.
I always felt that Dante would have been less devoted to Virgil had he known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends _enragé_ of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted prairie.
A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told. "A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of reading, and, as for the good old books--nobody reads them any more." On the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."