this should have been the case on five different occasions is a most improbable story, and the notion seems to have originated in the common illiberal jealousy of female genius. The women of Greece furnish perpetual instances of fine intellect, and I know not if Sappho be excelled by any male writer in a style at once energetic and simple. The statue of Pindar was erected in the circus of games at Thebes. His house was spared by the Spartans when they took that city—an honor equally paid to it by Alexander-to which circumstance Milton alludes in his noble sonnet written "when the assault was intended to the city:" Miss Bremer lingered for some time in Eng- | were biased by the lady's beauty, but that land, cementing old friendships and forming new ones, but the fatal illness of her only sister gave her a melancholy summons homeward, and she arrived to find yet another vacancy at her domestic hearth. After her return to Sweden her energies and interests were especially concentrated on the educational movement having reference to the children of the poorest classes, with whom, it may be remembered, Madame Goldschmidt a few years ago displayed so generous and practical a sympathy. The old Scandinavian land, therefore, owes to these its daughters not merely the prestige of their individual gifts, but the promotion of the great fundamental principle of social virtue and order. Miss Bremer was born August 17,1801; she died December 31, 1866. PIND PINDAR. THOMPSON COOPER. INDARUS was born at Thebes, in Boeotia, about forty years before Xerxes the Persian invaded Greece (B. C. 521). He was regarded with such veneration that the priestess of the Delphic oracle ordered the people to appropriate to him a share of their first-fruits, and an iron chair was placed for him in the temple of Apollo, in which he was accustomed to sit and declaim his verses. Hiero, king of Sicily, was his patron, and he was engaged at a great price by the different conquerors in the games of Greece to compose triumphal odes in their honor. Although generally unrivalled in the national contests of poetry, he was nevertheless five times surpassed by the poetess Corinna. Pausanias, indeed, alleges that the umpires "Lift not thy spear against the Muses' bower; The moderns have felt it necessary to admire Pindar, but, as they have admired. him on quite a mistaken principle, much of this enthusiasm is probably affected. They is lost poems to those which now remain. have applied the traditional character of Horace describes him in these terms: sometimes breaks through the veil of wit, "dark with excessive bright," that usually obscures it: "Lo! how th' obsequious wind and swelling air But it has been all along forgotten that Horace is speaking of Pindar's dithyrambics to Bacchus, which, together with his peans to Apollo, are, unfortunately, lost. It is from this traditionary character that Pope, under the same mistaken impression, describes him: "Here, like some furious prophet, Pindar rode, But in the odes which have reached us he rather appears as a grave, sacerdotal bard, riding, indeed, in a chariot drawn by four fiery coursers, but reining them abreast with an easy mastery by a curb of iron. The censurers of Pindar, who imagine that his digressions and transitions are the marks of an ungovernable fancy, are equally mistaken with his admirers, who see in them the sallies of poetic transport and the fine irregularitythe beau désordre, as Boileau phrases itwhich they conceive to be essentially characteristic of the ode, and which they suppose to represent the frenzy of inspiration. Neither in his numbers, which are strictly metrical, nor in the plan of his poems, which are of uniform contrivance, is Pindar, as he appears to us, that foaming enthusiast, that maniacal bard, that "furious prophet," which the received opinion would lead us to believe. We see in Pindar a man of genius escaping from the barren monotony of his subject with an intuitive judgment and facility which to the Greeks, who listened with interest to their historic legends and mythological tales, must have appeared delightful. Pindar saw that a chariot-race could admit of no variety; he therefore merely used his subject and his hero as hints for different episodes, not confusedly jumbled together, but growing out of each other. If the conqueror in the race had any pretensions to a descent from gods or heroes, he seized the occasion, by tracing his pedigree, to emblazon his ode with fabulous marvels or heroic exploits; if this were denied him, he struck out some moral truth, which he proceeded to illustrate from some tale of mythical lore; this tale suggested another, and that, perhaps, a third, but they all hinged together, and he brought back the reader at the close to the subject from which he had digressed. An attention to this method of Pindar will show that, so far from bounding along on an ungovernable Pegasus, nothing can be more steady or more managed than his paces, nothing more systematic than the structure of his poems or more lucid than the disposition of his subject; and his style, also, so far from sweeping along with the rapidity ascribed to it, is rather grave and solemn and invested with a certain composed and stately energy. The art of his plan is, however, the result of a felicity of genius, and not of labor. Critics of the French school, who talk of Pindar's metaphoric diction as exceeding the just limits of what they cantingly call a correct style, appear to fancy that he fashioned these bold metaphors on the anvil with a forced heat and a pedantic ambition to be great and swelling, but they only show that they understand neither the genius of ancient manners nor that of the Greek language. There is no labor in Pindar, and there cannot be a greater proof of the vulgar misconception respecting him than the common comparison of Pindar with Gray, whose whole poetical life was consumed in the painful elaboration of a few slender odes in which we trace the commonplaces of a scholar's reading and perceive the odor of the lamp. Collins bears an infinitely closer resemblance to the simple spontaneousness, the fine abstraction and ideal sublime, of Pindar, but perhaps, if we wish for a parallel with Pindar's odes, we must seek it in the odes and choruses of Milton. We perceive in the lyrics of Milton and in the odes of Pindar a similar copiousness of words and thoughts and images, rolling forth as if involuntarily from the deep and abundant sources of fancy and reflection; a similar severe and chaste style, relieved by a freshness of color and picturesqueness of manner in descriptive painting and the intermixture of gorgeously romantic imagery; a similar lofty and calm abstractedness of imagination, and the same purity and unworldliness of feeling, the same religious tone and almost oracular emphasis in the uttering of moral truths. L CHARLES ABRAHAM ELTON. THE REWARD OF THE GOOD. FROM THE GREEK OF PINDAR. IKE an unrivalled star The state where spirits of the dead, Nor yet upturn the waters of the sea But in the blessed company Of spirits by the gods with honor crowned— shent Their days through tearless ages run : To Saturn's ancient tower beside the deep, That opulence a true and steady light, The blissful troops of these Sheds wide abroad in human sight, And he that owns it knows within his soul For their twined wrists inwoven bracelets wreathe, And garlands for their brow. Translation of CHARLES ABRAHAM ELTON. A light of stars shone round her head; I Else could I bear, on all days of the yearNot now alone, this gentle summer night, saw The sombre shores that gloomed the lake When scythes are busy in the headed grass And the full moon warms me to thoughtful ness This voice that haunts the desert of my soul: "It might have been!" Alas! "it might have been !" WILLIAM CROSS WILLIAMSON. THE AGED. I LOVE the aged: every silver hair On their time-honored brows speaks to my heart In language of the past: each furrow there The aged Christian stands upon the shore I love to sit and hear him draw from thence Sweet recollections of his journey pastA journey crowned with blessings to the last. Let this remembrance comfort me-that Lovely the aged when like shocks of corn when Full ripe and ready for the reaper's hand, My heart seemed bursting like a restless Which garners for the resurrection-morn wave That, swollen with fearful longing for the shore, Throws its strong life on the imagined bliss The bodies of the just, in hope they stand; And dead must be the heart, the bosom cold, Which warms not with affection for the old. MARGUERITE ST. LEON LOUD (Miss Barstow). |