Sweets for Scholars
THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.
HEAVEN has blessed me with a friend, an honest, plodding Hellenophile, who digs, as Adam may be supposed to have done, for love of it. When I heard from him, last summer, he was where he intends to spend the rest of his life : not in his native Brattleboro, but in the Archipelago. Never was a man deeper in his vocation. His talk is all, like the gentle king’s,
although he was ever a most cheerful wight. His spade and his peering spectacles have made close acquaintance with the undersurface of Greece, and with the Grecianized borders of Asia and Africa. The results seem to me already very considerable. I am proud to be the first to print several brief verses, unknown to Cephalas in his convent, which Folsom has found, sometimes in absolute preservation, on burial stones and urns of the first and second centuries before Christ. So jealous has he grown since he set out upon his archæological travels (patient journeys, doubling and crossing on themselves, within a radius of less than seven hundred miles) that I doubt whether he intends, at any time, to give these precious fragments, in their original state, to the public. As poems, he hardly knows what value to put upon them; as relics of a grand civilization, he is their confirmed worshiper. But Folsom has too cautious a mind to bring forth a book on the subject; and he has, besides, the Horatian dread: he would not wish to be “in every gentleman’s library.” Meanwhile, it was easy for me to persuade him to let me use a few of the inscriptions in a magazine which he is still disposed to read. I have them before me, copied on gray paper, in his own crabbed hand which has changed not at all since we were boys together in old S舒’s bated schoolroom ; and the letter containing them was registered, at my request, at the post office in Rhodes: so that the whole thing must have seemed to him modem and irreverent enough. With great diffidence, and conscious that I am not myself, like Mr. Andrew Lang, a poet of the winning Alexandrian breed, I submit the following close translations of Folsom’s waifs and strays. They begin with three epitaphs, over which Professor W舒 and I have made many blind and daring guesses, and which are enough like Meleager’s affectionate accents to “ tease us out of thought,” The third, moreover, is interesting as corroborated evidence of the suspicion of immortality among the “ poor heathen.”
Turn the diligent oar that brought thee thither,
Soul, remember ; and leave a kiss upon it
For thy desolate father, for thy sister,
Whichsoever be first to cross hereafter.”
The fallen leaves delay;
But plain and pure their trace is, when themselves are
tron From delicate frost away.
Thou wert and art to me ;
So on my passing life is thy long-passëd touch,
O dear Alcithoë ! ”
Thee, Aristeus; thou wert one
Fit to trample out the sun :
Who shall think thine ardors are
But a cinder in a jar ? ”
The lines on a victor in the foot races I please myself by attributing to Leonidas of Tarentum. Folsom, on the other hand, thinks it perfectly blasphemous to speculate on the authorship of such gifts of the gods. This is as happy-hearted a funeral song as any that has come down to us : —
was moulded;
Wise Æthalides’ son, himself no lover of study,
Cnopus, asleep, indoors, the young invincible runner.
They from the cliff footpath that see on the grave
we made him,
Tameless, slant in the wind, the bare, the beautiful iris,
Stop short, full of delight, and shout forth, ‘ See, it is
Cnopus
Runs, with white throat forward, over the sands to
Chalcis! ’ ”
It is to be observed Low vaingloriously the unknown author gets in his slap at Æthalides, a kind, slow, round-shouldered old fellow, no doubt, like Folsom, for all the world. My best Grecian, Professor W舒, is greatly taken with what some poet (could it be Palladas ?) has to say of a young child. The epitaph has much of the early Spartan spirit : —
I lowered the torch, I poured the cup to Dis.
Now hushaby, my little child, and learn
Long sleep how good it is,
Peace to her heart, where only heartaches dwell;
But thou more blest, O wild intelligence !
Forget her, and farewell.”
And here again, I say to myself, is Callimachus, lover of little things perfected with large meanings. It is a pity that this flute-sigh should not be in the Anthology, as indeed it may have been, long ago : —
Shade of the dammar-pine,
Here on thy hillside bed :
Fair befall thee, O fair
Lily of womanhood,
Patient long, and at last
Happier; ah, Blæsilla !”
Two more end the list, the former in Sapphics : —
Late the urn of many a kinsman wreathing.
On thine own shall even the stranger offer
Plentiful myrtle.”
ing,
Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,
Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with
reaping.”
The Aulon mentioned, Folsom tells me, is not Aulon at the head of the Illyrian bay, but the Aulon of the peninsula, much farther south, on the same west coast. The urn of Aristeus was discovered under a stall outside Alexandria itself, and that of Xeno, who seems to have been a survivor of battles or some other public sorrow, is judged to belong to the third rather than to the second century. Some of the inscriptions were pieced together with extreme difficulty. A few, such as that of a certain Agathon, a portion of whose princely tomb lay flat on the beach under the crags of Paros, were wholly undecipherable ; and I will try to think, therefore, that they do not rank with the eight I have given, full of the semi-tropic fragrance of dying Greece. We owe this little quarry of a twenty years’ hunt to a Vermont, Yankee ; to no expedition other than Folsom’s love and zeal. La science cherche; l’amour a trouvé.