Come to Lethe's wavy shore, Tell them they shall mourn no more. Thine their hearts, their altars thine; Must they, Dian--must they pine? XV. LIKE some wanton filly sporting, Thou trip'st away, with scornful eye, Thou'lt find this skilful hand can throw LXVI. To thee, the Queen of nymphs divine, Look on thy bride, too happy boy, Not more the rose, the queen of flowers, To bloom like her, and tower like thee! LXVII RICH in bliss, I proudly scorn LXVIII. Now Neptune's month our sky deforms, Now, now, my friends, the gathering gloom LXIX. THEY Wove the lotus band to deck Pour'd the rich droppings of the grape! LXX. A BROKEN cake, with honey sweet, LXXI. WITH twenty chords my lyre is hung, The nursling fawn, that in some shade LXXII. FARE thee well, perfidious maid, I fly to seek a kindlier sphere, LXXIII. AWHILE I bloom'd, a happy flower, Till Love approach'd one fatal hour And made my tender branches feel The wounds of his avenging steel. Then lost I fell, like some poor willow That falls across the wintry billow! LXXIV MONARCH Love, resistless boy, LXXV. SPIRIT of Love, whose locks unroll'd, Stream on the breeze like floating gold; Come, within a fragrant cloud Blushing with light, thy votary shroud; But she, the nymph for whom I glow, LXXVI. HITHER, gentle muse of mine, For the nymph with vest of gold. Pretty nymyh, of tender age, Fair thy silky locks unfold; Listen to a hoary sage, Sweetest maid with vest of gold! LXXVII. WOULD that I were a tuneful lyre, Would that I were a golden vase, That some bright nymph might hold My spotless frame, with blushing grace, Herself as pure as gold! LXXVIII. WHEN Cupid sees how thickly now, CUPID, whose lamp has lent the ray, I know thou lov'st a brimming measure, I FEAR that love disturbs my rest, Yet cannot find that madness there! FROM dread Leucadia's frowning steep, MIx me, child, a cup divine, AMONG the Epigrams of the Anthologia, are found some panegyrics on Anacreon, which I had translated, and origi nally intended as a sort of Coronis to this work. But I found upon consideration, that they wanted variety; and that a frequent recurrence, in them, of the same thought would render a collection of such poems uninteresting. I shall take the liberty, however, of subjoining a few, se lected from the number, that I may not appear to have totally neglected those ancient tributes to the fame of Anacreon. The four epigrams which I give are imputed to Antipater Sidonius. They are rendered, perhaps, with too much freedom; but designing originally a translation of all that are extant on the subject, I endeavoured to enliven their uniformity by sometimes indulging in the liberties o paraphrase. AROUND the tomb, oh, bard divine! Where soft thy hallow'd brow reposes, And every fount be milky showers. Thus, after death, if shades can feel, Thou may'st, from odours round thee streaming. And live again in blissful dreaming! HERE sleeps Anacreon, in this ivied shade; Он stranger! if Anacreon's shell Ar length thy golden hours have wing'd their flight, Thy harp, that whisper'd through each lingering night, She too, for whom that harp profusely shed She, the young spring of thy desires, hath fled, Farewell! thou had'st a pulse for every dart That mighty Love could scatter from his quiver, And each new beauty found in thee a heart, Which thou, with all thy heart and soul, didst give har i REMARKS ON ANACREON. THERE is but little known with certainty of the life of Anacreon. Chameleor. Heracleotes, who wrote upon the subject, has been lost in the general wreck of ancient literature. The editors of the poet have ollect d the few trifling anecdotes which are scattered through the extant authors of antiquity, and, supplying the deficiency of materials Dy fictions of their own imagination, have arranged, what they call, a life of Anacreon. These specious fabrications are intended to indulge that interest which we naturally feel in the biography of illustrious men; but it is rather a dangerous kind of illusion, as it confounds the umits of history and romance, and is too often supported by unfaithful citation. Our poet was born in the city of Téos, in the delicious region of lonia, and the time of his birth appears to have been in the sixth century before Christ. He flourished at that remarkable period, when, under the polished tyrants Hipparchus and Polycrates, Athens and Samos were become the rival asylums of genius. There is nothing certain known about his family, and those who pretend to discover in Plato that he was a descendant of the monarch Codrus, show much more of zeal than of either accuracy or judgment. The disposition and talents of Anacreon recommended him to the monarch of Samos, and he was formed to be the friend of such a prince as Polycrates. Susceptible only to the pleasures, he felt not the corruptions of the court; and, while Pythagoras fled from the tyrant, Anacreon was celebrating his praises on the lyre. We are told too by Maximus Tyrius, that, by the influence of his amatory songs, he softened the mind of Polycrates into a spirit of benevolence towards his subjects. The amours of the poet, and the rivalship of the tyrant, I shall pass over in silence; and there are are few, I presume, who will regret the emission of most of those anecdotes, which the industry of some editors has not only promulged, but discussed. Whatever is repugnant to modesty and virtue is considered in ethical science, by a supposition very favourable to humanity, as impossible; and this amiable persuasion should be much more strongly entertainel, where the transgres sion wars with nature as well as virtue. But why are we not allowed to indulge in the presumption? Why are we officiously reminded that there have been really such instances of depravity? Hipparchus, who now maintained at Athens the power which his father Pisistratus had usurped, was one of those princes who may be said to have polished the fetters of their subjects. He was the first, according to Plato, who edite the poems of Homer, and commanded them to be sung by the rhapsodists at the celebration of the Panathe næa. From his court, which was a sort of galaxy of genius, Anacreon could not long be absent. Hipparchus sent a barge for him; the poet readily embraced the invitation, and the Muses and the Loves were wafted with him to Athens. The manner of Anacreon's death was singular. We are told that in the eighty-fifth year of his age he was choked by a grape-stone; and, however we may smile at their enthusiastic partiality, who see in this easy and characteristic death a peculiar indulgence of Heaven, we cannot help admiring that his fate should have been so emblematic of his disposition. Cælius Calcagninus alludes to this catastrophe in the following epitaph on our poet : Those lips, then, hallow'd sage, which pour'd along Here let the ivy kiss the poet's tomb, But far be thou, oh! far, unholy vine, By whom the favourite minstrel of the Nine Thy God himself now blushes to confess, Since poor Anacreon's death. it has been supposed by some writers that Anacreon and Sappho were contemporaries; and the very thought of an intercourse between persons so congenial, both in warmth of passion and delicacy of genius, gives such play to the imagination, that the mind loves to indulge in it. But the vision dissolves before historical truth; and Chamaleon and Hermesianax, who are the source of the supposition, are con. sidered as having merely indulged in a poetical anachronism. To infer the moral dispositions of a poet from the tone of sentiment which pervades his works, is sometimes a very fallacious analogy; but the soul of Anacreon speaks so unequivocally through his odes, that we may safely consult them as the faithful mirrors of his heart. We find him there the elegant voluptuary, diffusing the seductive charm of sentiment over passions and propensities at which rigid morality must frown. His heart, devoted to indolence, seems to have thought that there was wealth enough in happiness, but seldom happiness in mee wealth. The cheerfulness, indeed, with which he brightens his old age is interesting and endearing: like his own rose, he is fragrant even in decay. But the most peculiar feature of his mind is that love of simplicity, which he attributes to himself so feelingly, and which breathes characteristically throughout all that he has su ag. In truth, if we omit those few vices in our estimate which religion, at that time, not only connived at, but consecrated, we shall be inclined to say that the disposition of our poet was amiable; that his morality was relaxed, but not abandoned; and that Virtue with her zone loosened, may be an apt emblem of the character of Anacreon. Of his person and physiognomy time has preserved such uncertain memorials, that it were better, perhaps, to leave the pencil to fancy; and few can read the Odes of Anacreon without imagining to themselves the form of the animated old bard, crowned with roses, and singing cheerfully to his lyre. After the very enthusiastic eulogiums bestowed both by ancients and moderns upon the poems of Anacreon, we need not be diffident in xpressing our raptures at their beauty, nor hesitate to pronounce hem the most polished remains of antiquity. They are, indeed, all eauty, all encheatment. He steals us so insensibly along with him, that we sympathise even in his excesses. In his amatory odes there is a delicacy of compliment not to be found in any other ancient poet Love at that period was rather an unrefined emotion: and the inter course of the sexes was animated more by passion than by sentiment. They knew not those little tendernesses which form the spiritual pert of affection; their expression of feeling was therefore rude and unva ried, and the poetry of love deprived it of its most captivating graces. Anacreon, however, attained some ideas of this purer gallantry: and the same delicacy of mn which led him to this refinement, prevented him also from yielding to the freedom of language, which has sullied the pages of all the other poets. His descriptions are warm; but the warmth is in the ideas, not the words He is sportive without being wanton, and ardent without being licentious. His poetic inventions always most brilliantly displayed in those allegorical fictions which so many have endeavoured to imitate, though all have confessed them to be inimitable. Simplicity is the distinguishing feature of these odes, and they interest by their innocence, as much as they fascinate by their beauty. They may be said, indeed, to be the very infants of the Muses, and to lisp in numbers. I shall not be accused of enthusiastic partiality by those who have read and felt the original; but to others, I am conscious, this should not be the language of a translator, whose faint reflection of such beau ties can but ill justify his admiration of them. In the age of Anacreon music and poetry were inseparable. These kindred talents were for a long time associated, and the poet always sung his own compositions to the lyre. It is probable that they were not set to any regular air, but rather a kind of musical recitation, which was varied according to the fancy and feelings of the moment The poems of Anacreon were sung at banquets as late as the time of Aulus Gellius, who tells us that he heard one of the odes performed at a birth-day entertainment. The singular beauty of our poet's style, and the apparent facility perhaps, of his metre have attracted, as I have already remarked, r crowd of imitators. Some of these have succeeded with wonderful fe licity, as may be discerned in the few odes which are attributed to writers of a later period. But none of his imitators have been half so dangerous to his fame as those Greek ecclesiastics of the early ages, who, being conscious of their own inferiority to their great prototypes, determined on removing all possibility of comparison, and, under a semblance of moral zeal, deprived the world of some of the most exquisite treasures of ancient times. The works of Sappho and Alcaus were among those flowers of Grecian literature which thus fell be neath the rude hand of ecclesiastical presumption. It is true they pre tended that this sacrifice of genius was hallowed by the interests of religion; but I have already assigned the most probable motive: and if Gregorius Nazianzenus had not written Anacreontics, we might now perhaps have the works of the Teian unmutilated, and be empowered to say exultingly with Horace, Nec si quid oli kad Jawska Delevit ætas. The zeal by which these bishops professed to be actuated, gave birth more innocently indeed, to an absurd species of parody, as repugnal to piety as it is to taste, where the poet of voluptuousness was made a preacher of the gospel, and his muse, like the Venus in armour at L cedæmon, was arrayed in all the severities of priestly instruction Such was the "Anacreon Recantatns," by Carolus de Aquino, a Je suit, published 1701, which consisted of a series of palinodes to the several songs of our poet. Such, too, was the Christian Anacreon of Patriganus, another Jesuit, who preposterously transferred to a most sacred subject all that the Grecian poet had dedicated to festivity and love. His metre has frequently been adopted by the modern Latin poets, and Scaliger, Taubman, Barthius, and others, have shown that it is by no means uncongenial with that language. The Anacreonties of Ses liger, however, scarcely deserve the name; as they glitter all over with conceits, and though often elegant, are always laboured. The beautiful fitions of Angerianus preserve more happily than any others the delicate turn of those allegorical fables, which, passing so frequently through the mediums of version and imitation, have gene rally lost their finest rays in the transmission. Many of the Italian poets have indulged their fancies upon the subjects, and in the manner of Anacreon. Bernardo Tasso first introduced the metre, which war afterwards polished and enriched by Chabriera and others. To judge by the references of Degen, the German language abounds in Anacreontic imitations; and Hagedorn is one among many who have assumed him as a model. La Farre, Chaulieu, and the other light poets of France, have also professed to cultivate the muse of Téos; but they have attained all her negligence with little of the sim ple grace that embellishes it. In the delicate bard of Schiras we find the kindred spirit of Anacreon: some of his gazelles or songs possess all the character of our poet. We come now to a retrospect of the editions of Anacreon. To Henry Stephens we are indebted for having first recovered his remains from the obscurity in which, so singularly, they had for many ages reposed. He found the seventh ode, as we are told, on the cover of an old book, and communicated it to Victorius, who mentions the circum stance in his "Various Reading." Stephen was then very young, and this discovery was considered by some critics of that day as a lite rary imposition. In 1554, however, he gave Anacreon to the world, accompanied with annotations and a Latin version of the greater part of the odes. The learned still hesitated to receive them as the relics of the Teian bard, and suspected them to be the fabrication of some monks of the sixteenth century. This was an idea from which the classic muse recoiled; and the Vatican manuscript, consulted by Sca liger and Salmasins, confirmed the antiquity of the poems. A very inaccurate copy of this MS. was taken by Isaac Vossins, and this is the authority which Barnes has followed in his collation. Accordingly he misrepresents almost as often as he quotes; and the subsequent d tors, relying upon his authority, have spoken of the manuscript with not less confidence than ignorance. The literary world, however, has at length been gratified with this curions memorial of the poet, by the industry of the Abbé Spaletti, who published at Rome, in 1781, a fac simile of those pages of the Vatican manuscript which contained the odes of Anacreon. RHYMES ON THE ROAD, EXTRACTED FROM THE JOURNAL OF A TRAVELLING MEMBER OF THE POCO.CURANTE SOCIETY. THE greater part of the following Rhymes were written or composed in an old caleche, for the purpose of beguiling the ennui of solitary travelling; and as verses, made by a gentleman in his sleep, have been lately called "a psychological curiosity," it is to be hoped that verses, composed by a gentleman to keep himself awake, may be honoured with some appellation equally Greek. INTRODUCTORY RHYMES. Different Attitudes in which Authors compose.-Bayes, Henry Stephens, Herodotus, &c.-Writing in Bed-in the Fields.-Plato and Sir Ri chard Blackmore.-Fiddling with Gloves and Twigs.-Madame de Stael-Rhyming on the Road, in an old Caleche. WHAT various attitudes, and ways, And tricks, we authors have in writing! While some, like HENRY STEPHENS, pour out And RICHERAND, a French physician, Goes best in that reclin'd position. If you consult MONTAIGNE and PLINY on At home may, at their counters, stop; When, like an Eastern Prince, who leaves Whose heads are sunk, whose tears are flowing When wand'ring through the fields alone, If thus I've felt, how must they feel, Graven with Beauty's countless forms;- Shadows of heavenly things appear, Through other worlds, above our sphere! But this reminds me I digress ; For PLATO, too, produc'd, 'tis said, (As one, indeed, might almost guess,) His glorious visions all in bed. 'Twas in his carriage the sublime Sir RICHARD BLACKMORE Used to rhyne; And (if the wits don't do him wrong) Now warbling forth a lofty song, Nine charming odes, which, if you'll look, In short, 'twere endless to recite The various modes in which men write. Some wits are only in the mind, When beaux and belles are round them prating, Some bards there are who cannot scribble As if the hidden founts of Fancy, To the odd way in which I write- Anxious to reach that splendid view, Approaching scenes, where, they are told, Twas distant yet, and, as I ran, Full often was my wistful gaze To call in all his out-post rays, Diminish'd to a speck, as splendid Twas at this instant-while there glow'd The ram arts of a Godhead's dwelling. I stood entranc'd-as Rabbins say This whole assembled, gazing world Will stand, upon that awful day, When the Ark's Light, aloft unfurl'd, Among the opening clouds shall shine, Divinity's own radiant sign! Mighty MONT BLANC, thou wert to me, That minute, with thy brow in ceaven, As sure a sign of Deity As e'er to mortal gaze was given. Nor ever, were I destin'd yet To live my life twice o'er again, Can I the deep-felt awe forget, The dream, the trance that rapt me then! 'Twas all that consciousness of pow'r When near their time for change of skies;- To rank among the Sons of Light, Of sacred zeal, which, could it shine At the same calm and glowing hour, In the year 1792, when the forces of Berne, Sardinia, and France laid siege to Geneva, and when, after a demonstration of heroism and self-devotion, which promised to rival the feats of their ancestors in 1602 against Savoy, the Genevans, either panic struck or betrayed, to YES-if there yet live some of hose, His well-known fetters at her gates, At Freedom's base their sacred blood; From rank to rank, from breast to breast, Where, one step more, and he must sink- Throughout the embattled thousands ran, To the proud foe-nor sword was urawi, While some, in impotent despair, In History's page, the eternal mark For Scorn to pierce-so help me, Heav'r. I wish the traitorous slaves no worse, From all earth's ills no fouler curse their master! EXTRACT III. Genera Fancy and Truth.-Hippomenes and Atalanta.-Mont Blanc-Closak Of high-towering Alps, touch'd still with a light As if nearness to Heaven had made them so oright' Then the dying, at last, of these splendours away From peak after peak, till they left but a cay, One roseate ray, that, too precious to fly, O'er the Mighty of Mountains still glowingly hung, the surprise of all Europe, opened their gates to the besiegers, and ab mitted without a struggle to the extinction of their liberties-539 account of this Revolution in Coxe's Switzerland. |