OF all Gods Death alone Disdaineth sacrifice: No man hath found or shown The gift that Death would prize. In vain are songs or sighs, Pæan, or praise, or moan, Alone beneath the skies Hath Death no altar-stone!
There is no head so dear That men would grudge to Death; Let Death but ask, we give All gifts that we may live; But though Death dwells so near, We know not what he saith.
(_Soph._, _Fr._, 235; _Æsch._, _Fr._, 56.)
ON these Nysæan shores divine The clusters ripen in a day. At dawn the blossom shreds away; The berried grapes are green and fine And full by noon; in day’s decline They’re purple with a bloom of grey, And e’er the twilight plucked are they, And crushed, by nightfall, into wine.
But through the night with torch in hand Down the dusk hills the Mænads fare; The bull-voiced mummers roar and blare, The muffled timbrels swell and sound, And drown the clamour of the band Like thunder moaning underground.
HERE be the fairest homes the land can show, The silvery-cliffed Colonus; always here The nightingale doth haunt and singeth clear, For well the deep green gardens doth she know. Groves of the God, where winds may never blow, Nor men may tread, nor noontide sun may peer Among the myriad-berried ivy dear, Where Dionysus wanders to and fro.
For here he loves to dwell, and here resort These Nymphs that are his nurses and his court, And golden eyed beneath the dewy boughs The crocus burns, and the narcissus fair Clusters his blooms to crown thy clustered hair, Demeter, and to wreathe the Maiden’s brows!
YEA, here the dew of Heaven upon the grain Fails never, nor the ceaseless water-spring, Near neighbour of Cephisus wandering, That day by day revisiteth the plain. Nor do the Goddesses the grove disdain, But chiefly here the Muses quire and sing, And here they love to weave their dancing ring, With Aphrodite of the golden rein.
And here there springs a plant that knoweth not The Asian mead, nor that great Dorian isle, Unsown, untilled, within our garden plot It dwells, the grey-leaved olive; ne’er shall guile Nor force of foemen root it from the spot: Zeus and Athene guarding it the while!
HOW Œdipous departed, who may tell Save Theseus only? for there neither came The burning bolt of thunder, and the flame To blast him into nothing, nor the swell Of sea-tide spurred by tempest on him fell. But some diviner herald none may name Called him, or inmost Earth’s abyss became The painless place where such a soul might dwell.