Then he who saw her knew her, and he knew The awful symbols borne in either hand; The golden urn that laves Demeter’s dew, The handles wreathed with asps, the mystic wand; The shaken seistron’s music, tinkling through The temples of that old Osirian land.
_MY heart an old Spinet with strings_ _To laughter chiefly turned_, _but some_ _That Fate has practised hard on_, _dumb_, _They answer not whoever sings_. _The ghosts of half-forgotten things_ _Will touch the keys with fingers numb_, _The little mocking spirits come_ _And thrill it with their fairy wings_.
_A jingling harmony it makes_ _My heart_, _my lyre_, _my old Spinet_, _And now a memory it wakes_, _And now the music means_ “_forget_,” _And little heed the player takes_ _Howe’er the thoughtful critic fret_.
Page 3. _The Fortunate Islands_. This piece is a rhymed loose version of a passage in the _Vera Historia_ of Lucian. The humorist was unable to resist the temptation to introduce passages of mockery, which are here omitted. Part of his description of the Isles of the Blest has a close and singular resemblance to the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse. The clear River of Life and the prodigality of gold and of precious stones may especially be noticed.
_Whoso doth taste the Dead Men’s bread_, &.c. This belief that the living may visit, on occasion, the dwellings of the dead, but can never return to earth if they taste the food of the departed, is expressed in myths of worldwide distribution. Because she ate the pomegranate seed, Persephone became subject to the spell of Hades. In Apuleius, Psyche, when she visits the place of souls, is advised to abstain from food. Kohl found the myth among the Ojibbeways, Mr. Codrington among the Solomon Islanders; it occurs in Samoa, in the Finnish Kalewala (where Wainamoinen, in Pohjola, refrains from touching meat or drink), and the belief has left its mark on the mediæval ballad of Thomas of Ercildoune. When he is in Fairy Land, the Fairy Queen supplies him with the bread and wine of earth, and will not suffer him to touch the fruits which grow “in this countrie.” See also “Wandering Willie” in Redgauntlet.
Page 20. _As now the hutted Eskimo_. The Eskimo and the miserable Fuegians are almost the only Socialists who practise what European Anarchists preach. The Fuegians go so far as to tear up any piece of cloth which one of the tribe may receive, so that each member may have a rag. The Eskimo are scarcely such consistent walkers, and canoes show a tendency to accumulate in the hands of proprietors. Formerly no Eskimo was allowed to possess more than one canoe. Such was the wild justice of the Polar philosophers.