overtops the stature of all in the Faerie Queene and seems to come again from "the Island Valley of Avillion". whenever the tide of English song runs strongest. Evening on the olden, the golden sea of Wales, There's a house that Britons walked in, long ago, Where now the springs of ocean fall and flow, And the dead robed in red and sea-lilies overhead FLECKER, The Dying Patriot. A large and possibly growing proportion will know the origin of these things only through translations, as Shakespeare and Keats knew them; but are they to know them as creative masterpieces, or as the source of that most dismal of all intellectual exercises, the "Note on a classical allusion," from which the poeticallyminded fly as from a sawdust sandwich? There is, perhaps, no better way of making children familiar with the true range of epic poetry than that of giving them short, well-made sketches of the narrative and reading to them, as perfectly as possible, long passages from fine translations which will awaken their determination to know the whole poem. So far the great prose translations, read with rhythmic swing, most completely meet the demands of the case. Then let them use the poems as the people among whom they were made used them, as a vehicle for dramatic expression. Let them mime the parting of Hector and Andromache or set the quarrel of the Chiefs to their own rhymes, even if they be as rude as those which kept alive the memory of the "Seven Worthies" for Costard and Holofernes. Many scenes, like the story of Nausicaa, will almost turn themselves into plays in any wooded garden, and if the actors may think out their dialogue from the familiar prose translation, the elder children will have little difficulty in swinging it back into a reasonable metric form. So poetry will mean to them from the first something greater than the sugar-sweet personal effusions of magazine verse, the conning of holiday tasks or local examination selections, or those most terrible "dramatic poems" with which the programmes of school entertainments are still occasionally made hilarious. The great age of Greek lyric poetry follows that of the epic. There is no question that it is in the various kinds of lyric verse that the poet most completely expresses the personal passion and individual music of his soul. It is only necessary to remember that of the great singers of Greece nearly every one gave his name to an individual stanza or line which first served him as a personal rhythm, and afterwards was recognised and adopted as the characteristic pattern of a form of verse suited to some special emotional expression: Mimnermus (circa 600 B.C.) Alcæus ( 640 B.C.) 620 B.C.) -each name has become associated with a measure so definite that the very thought of elegy, Alcaic, Sapphic, Anacreontic, idyll or eclogue remains bound up with the singer's individuality. We know little of what this music really was. The dialectical difficulties of the writing have rejoiced the heart of the grammarian, the attempts made to translate the elaborate quantitative patterns into accentual patterns-chaunt into drum-beat-without mastery of the laws of sound, or of the temporal duration of the metric units, has probably left no nearer approximation to the original music of the lines than the amusing travesty of the French Alexandrine quoted on page 62. Yet something has survived. Some sense of the wedding of form and content in a supreme artistry which has proved at least an inspiration to modern singers, an individuality which informs the personal note of all lyric verse. Round one name linger the most exquisite of such associations: Sappho, The Poetess, the Nightingale, pre-eminent "as the Lesbian Singer above those of other lands." Here is Swinburne's version of one of her favourite metres, the Sapphic stanza, to illustrate the inherent musical form inseparable from lyric poetry: Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion! While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not. Laurel by laurel Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, Sapphics. Here, taken from Professor Mackail's translation, are six among the tiny fragments by which we know her: (a) Now I will sing to my fellow-women delightful things. (b) My joy in the light of the sun holding within it all things radiant and fair. (c) Surely I am not one of those who bear malice in their temper, but my heart is innocent. (d) What country girl is this that bewitches your sense, one that does not know how to draw her skirts about her ankles? (e) Death is evil; for the Gods have so judged; else they would have died. (f) Sometime thou shalt lie dead, and no memory of thee shall be either then or afterward, for thou hast no part in roses from Pieria; but even in the chambers of Death thou shalt pass unknown, flitting forth among the dim ghosts. J. W. MACKAIL, Lectures on Greek Poetry. Here is a phonetic transcription of the famous lines to Aphrodite: poikilóthron arthánat aphrodiita, allá tчíd élth, ái pota kaitérotta éklyes, pátros dé dómon lípoisa árm ypazdéuksaisa, kálɔ dé s âigon âipsa d eksíkonto; sý d, ô mákaira kóitt émɔi málista thélɔ génesthai "kái gár ai phéugei, takhéɔ:s dióiksei, élthe moi kái nŷın, khalépain dé lŷ:son Swinburne's version of the equally famous fragment to Atthis is memorable: "I loved thee"-hark, one tenderer note than all- ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, Sapphics. Here are lines to her daughter on her deathbed: The variation of musical phrase-what is called stanzaic form-that is to say lines which do not keep an even length of structure but are grouped into short series attaining or passing a climax, and drawn together, or reined in, by a final phrase like the close of a perfect cadence in music; a line in which the wave-lengths |