Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

You will soon see his works, among others more, Cleone! If he had, far other would be his feelings voluminous. In the meanwhile, I can not end my letter in a pleasanter way than with a copy of these verses, which are nearer to the shortest than to the best.

Perilla! to thy fates resign'd,

Think not what years are gone:
While Atalanta look't behind
The golden fruit roll'd on.

Albeit a mother may have lost

The plaything at her breast,
Albeit the one she cherish't most,
It but endears the rest.

Youth, my Perilla, clings on Hope,
And looks into the skies
For brighter day; she fears to cope
With grief, she shrinks at sighs.
Why should the memory of the past
Make you and me complain?
Come, as we could not hold it fast,
We'll play it o'er again.

CXXXII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

There are odes in Alcæus which the pen would stop at, trip at, or leap over. Several in our collection are wanting in yours; this among them:

Wormwood and rue be on his tongue

And ashes on his head,

Who chills the feast and checks the song
With emblems of the dead!

By young and jovial, wise and brave,
Such mummers are derided.

His sacred rites shall Bacchus have,
Unspared and undivided.

Couch't by my friends, I fear no mask
Impending from above,

I only fear the later flask

That holds me from my love.

and his judgment. Before that age, how many seeds are sown, which future years, and distant ones, mature successively! How much fondness, how much generosity, what hosts of other virtues, courage, constancy, patriotism, spring into the father's heart from the cradle of his child! And does never the fear come over him, that what is most precious to him upon earth is left in careless or perfidious, in unsafe or unworthy hands? Does it never occur to him that he loses a son in every one of these five years? What is there so affecting to the brave and virtuous man, as that which perpetually wants his help and can not call for it! What is so different as the speaking and the mute! And hardly less so are inarticulate sounds, and sounds which he receives half-formed, and which he delights to modulate, and which he lays with infinite care and patience, not only on the tender attentive ear, but on the half-open lips, and on the eyes, and on the cheeks; as if they all were listeners. In every child there are many children; but coming forth year after year, each somewhat like and somewhat varying. When they are grown much older, the leaves (as it were) lose their pellucid green, the branches their graceful pliancy.

Is there any man so rich in happiness that he can afford to throw aside these first five years? is there any man who can hope for another five so exuberant in unsating joy?

O my sweet infant! I would teach thee to kneel before the Gods, were it only to thank 'em for being Athenian and not Persian.

CXXXIV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

Our good Anaxagoras said to me this morning,

Show these to any priest of Bacchus, especially to" You do well, Aspasia, to read history in preferany at Samos, and he will shake his head at you, telling you that Bacchus will never do without his masks and mysteries, which it is holier to fear than the later flask. On this subject, he would prove to you, all fears are empty ones.

CXXXIII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

In ancient nations there are grand repositories of wisdom, although it may happen that little of it is doled out to the exigencies of the people. There is more in the fables of Æsop than in the schools of our Athenian philosophers: there is more in the laws and usages of Persia, than in the greater part of those communities which are loud in denouncing them for barbarism. And yet there are some that shock me. We are told by Herodotus, who tells us whatever we know with certainty a step beyond our thresholds, that a boy in Persia is kept in the apartments of the women, and prohibited from seeing his father, until the fifth year. The reason is, he informs us, that if he dies before this age, his loss may give the parent no uneasiness. And such a custom he thinks commendable. Herodotus has no child,

ence to philosophy, not only on the recommendation but according to the practice of Pericles. A good historian will also be a good philosopher, but will take especial care that he be never caught in the attitude of disquisition or declamation. The golden vein must run through his field, but we must not see rising out of it the shaft and the machinery. We should moderate or repress our curiosity and fastidiousness. Perhaps at no time will there be written, by the most accurate and faithful historian, so much of truth as untruth. But actions enow will come out with sufficient prominence before the great tribunal of mankind, to exercise their judgment and regulate their proceedings. If statesmen looked attentively at everything past, they would find infallible guides in all emergencies. But leaders are apt to shudder at the idea of being led, and little know what different things are experiment and experience. The sagacity of a Pericles himself is neither rule nor authority to those impetuous men, who would rather have rich masters than frugal friends.

"The young folks from the school of your suitor Socrates, who begin to talk already of

travelling in Egypt when the plague is over, are likely to return with a distemper as incurable, breaking bulk with demons and dreams. They carry stem and stern too high out of the water, and are more attentive to the bustling and bellying of the streamers, than to the soundness of the mast, the compactness of the deck, or the capacity and cleanliness of the hold."

CXXXV. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

Anaxagoras told me yesterday that he had been conversing with some literary men, philosophers and poets, who agreed in one thing only, which is, that we are growing worse day after day, both in morality and intellect. Hints were thrown out that philosophy had mistaken her road, and that it was wonderful how she could be at once so dull and so mischievous. The philosophers themselves made this complaint: the poets were as severe on poetry, and were amazed that we were reduced so low as to be the hearers of Sophocles and Euripides, and three or four more, who however were quite good enough for such admirers.

"It is strange," said Anaxagoras, "that we are unwilling to receive the higher pleasures, when they come to us and solicit us, and when we are sure they will do us great and lasting good; and that we gape and pant after the lower, when we are equally sure they will do us great and lasting evil. I am incapable," continued he, "of enjoying so much pleasure from the works of imagination as these poets are, who would rather hate Euripides and Sophocles than be delighted by them, yet who follow the shade of Orpheus with as ardent an intensity of love as Orpheus followed the shade of Eurydice. Ignorant as I am of poetry, I dared not hazard the opinion that our two contemporaries were really deserving of more commendation on the score of verse, inferior as they might in originality be to Marsyas and Thamyris and the Centaur Chiron and to the philosophers I could only say, My dear friends! let us keep our temper firmly and our tenets laxly; and let any man correct both who will take the trouble. I come to you, Aspasia, to console me for the derision I bring home with me."

I kissed his brow, which was never serener, and assured him that he possessed more comfort than any mortal could bestow upon him, and that he was the only one living who never wanted any.

"I am not insensible," said he, "that every year, at my time of life, we lose some pleasure; some twig that once blossomed, cankers."

I never was fond of looking forward: I have invariably checked both hopes and wishes. It is but fair then that I should be allowed to turn away my eyes from the prospect of age: even if I could believe that it would come to me as placidly as it has come to Anaxagoras, I would rather lie down to sleep before the knees tremble as they bend. With Anaxagoras I never converse in this manner: for old men more willingly

talk of age than hear others talk of it; and neither fool nor philosopher likes to think of the time when he shall talk no longer. I told my dear old man that, having given a piece of moral to the philosophers, he must not be so unjust as to refuse a like present to the poets. About an hour before I began my letter, he came into the library, and, to my great surprise, brought me these verses, telling me that, if they were satirical, the satire fell entirely upon himself.

Pleasures! away; they please no more.
Friends! are they what they were before?
Loves! they are very idle things,
The best about them are their wings.
The dance! 'tis what the bear can do ;
Music! I hate your music too.

Whene'er these witnesses that Time
Hath snatcht the chaplet from our prime,
Are call'd by Nature, as we go
With eye more wary, step more slow,
And will be heard and noted down,
However we may fret or frown,
Shall we desire to leave the scene
Where all our former joys have been?
No, 'twere ungrateful and unwise!
But when die down our charities
For human weal and human woes,
Then is the time our eyes should close.

CXXXVI. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

We hear that another state has been rising up gradually to power, in the centre of Italy. It was originally formed of a band of pirates from some distant country, who took possession of two eminences, fortified long before, and overlooking a wide extent of country. Under these eminences, themselves but of little elevation, are five hillocks, on which they inclosed the cattle by night. It is reported that here were the remains of an ancient and extensive city, which served the robbers for hiding-places; and temples were not wanting in which to deprecate the vengeance of the Gods for the violences and murders they committed daily. The situation is unhealthy, which perhaps is the reason why the city was abandoned, and is likewise a sufficient one why it was rebuilt by the present occupants. They might perpetrate what depredations they pleased, confident that no force could long besiege them in a climate so pestilential. Relying on this advantage, they seized from time to time as many women as were requi site for any fresh accession of vagabonds, rogues, and murderers.

The Sabines bore the loss tolerably well, until the Romans (so they call themselves) went beyond all bounds, and even took their cattle from the yoke. The Sabines had endured all that it be came them to endure; but the lowing of their oxen from the seven hills reached their hearts and inflamed them with revenge. They are a pastoral and therefore a patient people, able to undergo the exertions, and endure the privations of war, but, never having been thieves, the Romans over-matched them in vigilance, activity, and enterprise; and have several times since

[ocr errors][ocr errors]

made incursions into their country, and forced | studies would allow; that he is continuing to corthem to disadvantageous conditions. Emboldened by success, they ventured to insult and exasperate the nearest of the Tyrrhenian princes.

The Tyrrhenians are a very proud and very ancient nation, and, like all nations that are proud and ancient, excell chiefly in enjoying themselves. Demaratos the Corinthian dwelt among them several years; and from the Corinthians they learned to improve their pottery, which however it does not appear that they ever have carried to the same perfection as the Corinthian, the best of it being indifferently copied, both in the form and in the figures on it.

Herodotus has written to Pericles all he could collect relating to them; and Pericles says the account is interesting. For my part I could hardly listen to it, although written by Herodotus and read by Pericles. I have quite forgotten the order of events. I think they are such as neither you nor anyone else, excepting those who live near them, will ever care about. But the Tyrrhenians really are an extraordinary people. They have no poets, no historians, no orators, no statuaries, no painters: they say they once had them: so much the more disgraceful. The Romans went out against them and dispersed them, although they blew many trumpets bravely, and brought (pretty nearly into action) many stout soothsayers. The enemy, it appears, has treated them with clemency: they may still feed soothsayers, blow horns, and have wives in common.

I hope it is near your bed-time: if it is, you will thank me for my letter.

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
[ocr errors]

Aspasia ! I perceive you are emulous of our Halicarnassian; but pray do not publish that historical Essay either in his name or your own. He does not treat the Romans quite so lightly as you do, and shows rather more justice to the Tyrrhenians. You forgot to mention some important facts recorded by him, and some doubts as weighty. We shall come to them presently. "Having heard of the Romans, but nothing distinctly, I wished to receive a clearer and a fuller account of them, and wrote to Herodotus by the first ship that sailed for Tarentum. The city where he is residing lies near it, and I gave orders that my letter should be taken thither, and delivered into his hands. Above a year is elapsed, during which time Herodotus tells me he has made all the inquiries which the pursuit of his

rect the errors, elucidate the doubtful points, and correct the style and arrangement of his history; and that, when he has completed it to his mind, he shall have time and curiosity to consider with some attention this remarkable tribe of barbarians.

"At present he has not been able to answer my questions; for never was writer so sedulous in the pursuit and examination of facts. What he sees, he describes clearly; what he hears, he relates faithfully; and he bestows the same care on the composition as he had bestowed on the investigation.

"The Romans I imagined had been subdued by Numa, a Sabine; for it can hardly be credited that so ferocious a community sent a friendly invitation to be governed and commanded by the prince of a people they had grossly and repeatedly insulted. What services had he rendered them? or by what means had they become acquainted with his aptitude for government? They had ever been rude and quarrelsome: he was distinguished for civility and gentleness. They had violated all that is most sacred in public and private life: virgins were seized by treachery, detained by force, and compelled to wipe the blood of their fathers off the sword of their ravishers. A fratricide king had recently been murdered by a magistracy of traitors. What man in his senses would change any condition of life to become the ruler of such a nation? None but he who had conquered and could control them: none but one who had swords enough for every head among them. Absolute power alone can tame them and fit them for anything better; and this power must reside in the hands of a brave and sagacious man, who will not permit it to be shared, or touched, or questioned. Under such a man such a people may become formidable, virtuous, and great. It is too true that, to be martial, a nation must taste of blood in its cradle. Philosophers may dispute it; but time past has written it down, and time to come will confirm it. Of these matters the sophists can know nothing: he who understands them best will be the least inclined to discourse on them.

"Another thing I doubted, and wished to know. Numa is called a Sabine. The Sabines are illiterate still in the time of Numa they were ruder; they had no commerce, no communication with countries beyond Italy; and yet there are writers who tell us that he introduced laws, on the whole not dissimilar to ours, and corrected the calendar. Is it credible? Is it possible? I am disposed to believe that both these services were rendered by the son of Demaratos, and that the calendar might have been made better, were it not requisite on such an occasion, more than almost any other, to consult the superstition of the populace.

"I myself am afraid of touching the calendar here in Athens, many as have been my conferences with Meton on the subject. Done it shall be; but it must be either just before a victory or just after.

there any great nation in contact with them. When they were much weaker, the Tyrrhenians conquered them, under the command of their prince Porsena; but thought they could leave them nowhere less inconveniently than in the place they themselves had abandoned. The Sabines, too, conquered them a second time, and imposed a king over them, but were so unsuspicious and inconsiderate as not to destroy the city, and parcel out the inhabitants for Greece, Sicily, and Africa.

"If the Sabine had sent an embassy, or even an individual, to Athens, in order to collect our laws, the archives of the city would retain a record of so wonderful an event. He certainly could not have picked them up in the pastures or woodlands of his own country. But the Corinthians know them well, and have copied most of them. All nations are fond of pushing the date of their civilization as high up as possible, and care not how remotely they place the benefits they have received. And probably some of the Romans, aware that Numa was their conqueror, helped Living as they did on their farms, with no to abolish the humiliating suspicion, by invest-hold upon the Romans but a king, who, residing ing him successively with the robes of a priest, in the city with few of his own countrymen about of a legislator, and of an astronomer. him, was rather a hostage than a ruler, his authority was soon subverted. The Sabines at this

[ocr errors]

miciliated by consanguinity. The Tyrrhenians are spent and effete. The government of the Romans, from royal, is now become aristocratical; and the people, deprived of their lawful share in the lands they conquered from so many enemies, swear hatred to kings, and sigh for their return. One flagrant crime consumed the regal authority; a thousand smouldering ones eat deep into the consular. The military system stands apart, admirable in its formation; and, unless that too falls, the Roman camps will move forward year after year, until the mountains and the seas of Italy shall not contain them. They are heirs to the wealth of worn-out nations, and, when they have seized upon their inheritance, they will fight with braver. The Romans will be to Italy what the Macedonians at some future day will be to Greece. "The old must give way to the young, nations like men, and men like leaves."

"His two nearest successors were warriors and conquerors. The third was the son of that De-time are partly won by conquest, and partly domaratos of whom we have spoken, and who, exiled from Corinth, settled among the Tyrrhenians, and afterward, being rich and eloquent, won over to his interest the discontented and venal of the Romans; at all times the great majority. We hear that he constructed of hewn stone a long, a spacious, and a lofty channel, to convey the filth of the town into the river: we hear, at the same time, that the town itself was fabricated of hurdles and mud, upon ruins of massy workmanship; that the best houses were roofed with rushes, and that the vases of the temples were earthen. Now, kings in general, and mostly those whose authority is recent and insecure, think rather of amusing the people by spectacles, or pampering their appetites by feasts and donatives, or dazzling their imagination by pomp and splendour. Theatres, not common sewers, suited best the Romans. Their first great exploit was performed in a theatre, at the cost of the Sabines. Moreover they were religious, and stole every God and Goddess they could lay their hands on. Surely so considerate a person as the son of Demaratos would have adapted his magnificence to the genius of the people, who never cared about filth, but were always most zealous in their devotions. This we might imagine would occur to him as more and more requisite on the capture of every town or village; for, when the Romans had killed the inhabitants, they transferred the Gods very diligently into their city, that they might not miss their worshippers. Now the Gods must have wanted room by degrees, and might not have liked their quarters. Five hundred temples could have been erected at less expense than the building of this stupendous duct. Did the son of Demaratos build it then?

"The people are still ignorant, still barbarous, still cruel, still intractable; but they are acute in the perception of their interests, and have established at last a form of government more resembling the Carthaginian than ours. As their power does not arise from commerce, like the power of Carthage, but strikes its roots into the solid earth, its only sure foundation, it is much less subject to the gusts of fortune, and will recover from a shock more speedily. Neither is

CXXXVIII. ASPASIA TO CLEONE.

Buildings of high antiquity have usually been carried by the imagination much higher still. But, by what we hear of the Tyrrhenians, we may believe that in their country there are remains of earlier times than in ours. Everything about them shows a pampered and dissolute and decaying people.

You will hardly think a sewer a subject for curiosity and investigation: yet nothing in Europe is so vast and so well-constructed as the sewer at Rome, excepting only the harbour walls and propylæa, built recently here at Athens, under the administration of Pericles. I have asked him some further questions on the wonderful work still extant in the city occupied by the Romans. I will now give you his answer.

"Do not imagine that, unable as I am to ascertain the time when the great sewer of Rome was constructed, I am desirous of establishing one opinion in prejudice of another, or forward in denying that a rich Corinthian might have devised so vast an undertaking. But in Corinth herself we find nothing of equal magnitude, nothing at all resembling its architecture: the Tyrrhenians, who are stated to have been employed in building

1

it, have ceased for many ages to be capable of anything similar; all their great fabrics may be dated more than a thousand years before the age of Tarquin. I feel no interest in the support of an hypothesis. Take it, or reject it; I would rather that you rejected it, if you would replace it with another and a better. Many things pass across the mind, which are neither to be detained in it with the intention of insisting on them as truths, nor are to be dismissed from it as idle and intrusive. Whatever gives exercise to our thoughts, gives them not only activity and strength, but likewise range. We are not obliged to continue on the training-ground; nor on the other hand is it expedient to obstruct it or plough it up. The hunter, in quest of one species of game, often finds another, and always finds what is better, freshness and earnestness and animation. Were I occupied in literature, I should little fear stumbling in my ascent toward its untrodden and abstruser scenery: being a politician, I know that a single false step is a fall, and a fall is ruin. We may begin wrong, and continue so with impunity; but we must not deviate from wrong to right."

He said this with one of his grave smiles; and then to me,

66

"A slender shrub, the ornament of your private walk, may with moderate effort be drawn straight again from any obliquity; but such an attempt, were it practicable, would crack every fibre in the twisted tree that overshades the forest."

[blocks in formation]

Who told you, Aspasia, that instead of poetry, of history, of philosophy, our writers at Miletus are beginning to compose a species of tales founded on love or madness, and ending in miserable death or wealthy marriage; and that at the conclusion of the work a strict account is rendered of all estrays, of all that had once come into it and had disappeared? Very true, the people at large run after the detail of adventures, and are as anxious to see the termination as they are to reach the bottom of an amphora: but I beseech you never to imagine that we are reduced in our literature to such a state of destitution, as to be without the enjoyment of those treasures which our ancestors left behind them. No, Aspasia, we are not yet so famished that a few morsels of more nutritious food would overpower us. I assure you, we do not desire to see a death or a marriage set upon the table every day. We are grateful for all the exercises and all the excursions of intellect, and our thanks are peculiarly due to those by whose genius our pleasure in them is increased or varied. If we have among us any one capable of devising an imaginary tale, wherein all that is interesting in poetry is united with all that is instructive in history, such an author will not supersede the poets and historians, but will walk between them, and be cordially hailed by both.

CXL. ASPASIA TO CLEone. When we are dull we run to music. I am sure you must be dull enough after so much of history and of politics. My Pericles can discover portents in Macedonia and Italy: Anaximander could see mountains in the moon: I desire to cast my eyes no farther than to Miletus. Take your harp.

ODE TO MILETUS.

Maiden there was whom Jove
Illuded into love,

Happy and pure was she;
Glorious from her the shore became,
And Helle lifted up her name

To shine eternal o'er the river-sea.

And many tears are shed
Upon thy bridal-bed,

Star of the swimmer in the lonely night!
Who with unbraided hair
Wipedst a breast so fair,

Bounding with toil, more bounding with delight.
But they whose prow hath past thy straits
And, ranged before Byzantion's gates,
Bring to the God of sea the victim due,

Even from the altar raise their eyes,
And drop the chalice with surprise,
And at such grandeur have forgotten you.
At last there swells the hymn of praise,
And who inspires those sacred lays?

"The founder of the walls ye see."
What human power could elevate
Those walls, that citadel, that gate?
"Miletus, O my sons! was he.'

Hail then, Miletus! hail beloved town,
Parent of me and mine!

But let not power alone be thy renown,
Nor chiefs of ancient line,

Nor visits of the Gods, unless

They leave their thoughts below,
And teach us that we most should bless
Those to whom most we owe.

Restless is Wealth; the nerves of Power
Sink, as a lute's in rain:

The Gods lend only for an hour
And then call back again

All else than Wisdom; she alone,
In Truth's or Virtue's form,
Descending from the starry throne

Thro' radiance and thro' storm,
Remains as long as godlike men

Afford her audience meet,
Nor Time nor War tread down again
The traces of her feet.

Always hast thou, Miletus, been the friend,
Protector, guardian, father, of the wise;
Therefore shall thy dominion never end

Till Fame, despoil'd of voice and pinion, dies. With favouring shouts and flowers thrown fast behind, Arctinos ran his race,

No wanderer he, alone and blind..

And Melesander was untorn by Thrace.
There have been, but not here,
Rich men who swept aside the royal feast
On child's or bondman's breast,
Bidding the wise and aged disappear.

Revere the aged and the wise,
Aspasia! but thy sandal is not worn

To trample on these things of scorn;
By his own sting the fire-bound scorpion dies.

« AnteriorContinuar »