shore, does my thought wing forth? “As a bird, as a thought," my spirit flies, whither? And in what shrine shall she find thee, among what oak-trees oracular, in rugged Ithaca, in Mycenae of the mighty walls, by Erechtheus' fane in Athens, or by the waters of Smyrna? The wild Roman emperor dreamed that the Sea came to his bedside and spake to him in human voice. Thy voice, though of a man, is as the voice of the sea. Comes its multitudinous music from one mouth, or, as it were, from a wilderness of waves on the waters of Time? "Others abide our question, thou art free,” — alone with Shakspeare in thy freedom. "Far off from men thou dwellest," like thine own Phoenicians, "in the midst of the wash of the waves that break on the shores of Greece. The old scholar sought to raise thy spirit and question it, but it came not. From no Oracle of the Dead dost thou utter thy response, -dwelling where Lucian saw thee among the souls of heroes in the Islands Fortunate. Glad and sad are thy fates, as those of Thamyris, whom the Muses reft of sight, but they gave him the gift of song. Song they have given thee, song immortal, but have borne thee, like thine own Odysseus, out of eyesight and ear-shot of mankind. The later learned have called thee, not "one form of many names," but one name of many forms. A hundred voices in varying centuries sang, so they tell us, some well, some ill, and all the voices blended in these thy two deathless poems, making an unison, making an anthem, making a ceaseless harmony in the ears of the world, blending magically in the enchanted tales that have shaped history and murmured at the cradles of Empires. So the innumerable atoms, falling, falling, through the limitless ether, have mingled, by chance, in one universe, or so they tell us. But, even if the universe came thus, uncreated, and is not bound by golden chains beneath the throne of Zeus, not so, methinks, came thy poems. Not so did any such poems ever come into the light; nay, mens agitat molem, as the Roman singer says of the whole cosmos and a mind shaped thy lay out of atoms of old song and oid story, and that mind, O unknown minstrel! was thine. Chance builds not up these palaces of Romance, perfect in design, from the goddess on the temple crest to the lowest stone of the altar. To Apollo's song did "Ilion, like a mist, grow into towers; nay, not to Apollo's song, but to thy harping. Chance builds no city, much less does chance people it with heroes and ladies, all living, all harmonious ever with themselves. Chance drew not the beauty, the sweetness, the helplessness of Helen; the courage of Hector, invincible and unclouded, though well he knows that sacred Ilios must perish, the city of Priam of the ashen spear. Chance makes not Odysseus always consistent with himself, the hardy heart, the ready at need, the man of wile, the indomitable by war and wave, the much enduring, the loved of goddesses. Chance never breathed life and love and hate and honor and ruthlessness into the breast of Achilles, and then melted the hatred in pity, and turned the ruthlessness to ruth at the sight of the tears and the gray hairs of his broken foe: who "seemed so like his father." It is because thou art so great, and men so little, that they misdoubt thee, not believing that the eyes of one alone have seen Hera on her couch of flowers, and Poseidon in the chariot of the sea; have looked on the face of war, on the arraying of goddesses, on the bridal chamber of Helen; have watched the lonely isle where Circe chants at her loom, and the gray vaporous dwellings of the dead. They believe not that one human soul has known every art, and all the thoughts of women as of men, all lives of beasts on hill and plain, all the innocence of childhood, and its beautiful ways, all the delight of battle, the dread of ambush, the slow agony of siege, the storms and the calms of the sea. In thy soul, as in the soul of Zeus, is the whole world mirrored; there is no mood but thou knowest and canst divine and declare it: but this is too much for the belief of bookmen "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," and they vow that thou art not one, but a multitude. Then, as even they know that Chance alone cannot shape many lays of many minstrels into one song, they must feign that some later wight, himself a bookman, patched and forged, and botched and bungled, till, somehow, he joined the scattered lays into the immortal wholes. Still, as being but a bookman, and scarce other than themselves, he must needs have been a blunderer, they are driven to justify themselves and their doctrine by finding blunders in thee. He who is bent on finding at all costs, discovers what he seeks. If Time has touched even thy work, here covering an altar with lichen, there making a stone to molder, or dimming the bronze work, or half obliterating a scroll, pedants seize on these things as proofs of their opinion, and the mistakes which they cannot find they very readily make out of their own abundance of misunderstanding. The city is not builded by an architect, the altar is not graven, the god is not carved by an artist. There is but a patched, botched ruin of many ages; fragments by many hands; scraps, odds and ends, rubbish, rough-hewn stones; a lumber-room of discrepant centuries: these things the learned see in the temples where the wise and brave of thirty centuries have worshiped, in the city where they have dwelt with souls divine, all honoring thee. Barbarians they are, and every where they see barbarism: living in a chaos, among the wrecks of worlds and faiths, they know not law, they find ruin everywhere, even in thine Iliad and Odyssey. The eye of each man sees but what it has the power of seeing, and what spectacles behold is not that which lies visible to the naked glance of natural men. We now possess instruments which show us a world within the common world, which thou and thy coevals, looking on, were glad. The smooth becomes rough under these instruments; the beautiful is changed; the cheek of Helen is scarred, seamed, pitted, when we stare at it through these glasses. Thy poems, too, so spied upon, are found thick with flaw and blemish, like the face of Helen; therefore, it is argued they are not thine, nor any one man's, but a heap of things old and not so old, fair and base as each man chooses to deem, and most deem differently, each squabbling with the other. Nay, let the learned turn the same instruments on any other art of men lately dead or of men living. The same blemishes, the same flaws, will they find, and honestly should come to the same conclusion, namely, that no one poem is the work of any one man. But they will not look this way, nor listen if any bids them look. They shall all die in their sins. Helen hath not blinded them as she blinded of old Stesichorus; but, cursing them in another fashion, has made them see the big as little, and the little as big, and nothing in thee as the natural eye beholds and the natural ear listens. Verily, when thou wert about shaping thy minstrelsy, thou hadst no such men in thy mind, but warriors, hunters, seamen, fair ladies, little children; and these others were unborn and undreamed of. Oh, Father of the rest, first and prince of poets, how often and how vainly we look through the far-off years seeking thy face! Do we find thee singing in some bronze-decked hall of rich Mycenæ, the golden cup standing at thy side, on the table of cedar and ivory; the bearded kings, the warriors, the women listening to thy song? May we discover thee practicing a new art and strange, graving Phoenician symbols on tablets of wood, or writing with a reed pen on slips of pen on slips of papyrus? At least we know the places that have known thee: long sands where the long wave breaks in thunder; woods that are haunted by the nymphs and fresh with spring; black ships with curved prow; rocks where the fisher sits and casts his lure into the sea; hills where the mist comes thick and dark; narrow glens in the mountains where is the meeting of two roaring streams; sea beaches where, in winter, the foam and the snow fly mingled; fields thickset with hyacinth and crocus; rivers that murmur between their steep walls to the deep,- all these things we see, as Homer saw them, and still shows them to us; and, seeing them, we know that we are where he has been, and we remember him and give him thanks. Gratitude, and praise, and love we offer to the mightiest of Makers, unknown and unseen, withdrawn and irresponsive as he is; praise, and love, and gratitude we bring him, as we bring them to the footstool of Zeus, whom we see not with the bodily eye, who speaks not to the fleshly ear. For there is a poet in the poems, as there is a God in the world. LES ROSES DE SÂDI. (From "Ban and Arrière Ban.") THIS morning I vowed I would bring thee my roses; The breast-knots were broken the roses together And the sea was as red as when sunset uncloses; THE ODYSSEY. (PREFIXED TO THE BUTCHER-LANG TRANSLATION.) As one that for a weary space has lain Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine Where that Ææan Isle forgets the Main, And only shadows of wan lovers pine; As such an one were glad to know the brine Men turn, and see the stars, and feel the free |