III. POEMS BY LIONEL JOHNSON.

88

THE CLASSICS.

To Ion Thynne.

FAIN to know golden things, fain to grow wise,
Fain to achieve the secret of fair souls:
His thought, scarce other lore need solemnize,
Whom Virgil calms, whom Sophocles controls:


Whose conscience Æschylus, a warrior voice,
Enchaunted hath with majesties of doom:
Whose melancholy mood can best rejoice,
When Horace sings, and roses bower the tomb:


Who, following Cæsar unto death, discerns
What bitter cause was Rome’s, to mourn that day:
With austere Tacitus for master, learns
To look of empire in its proud decay:


Whom dread Lucretius of the mighty line
Hath awed, but not borne down: who loves the flame,
That leaped within Catullus the divine,
His glory, and his beauty, and his shame:


Who dreams with Plato and, transcending dreams,
Mounts to the perfect City of true God:
Who hails its marvellous and haunting gleams,
Treading the steady air, as Plato trod:

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Who with Thucydides pursues the way,
Feeling the heart-beats of the ages gone:
Till fall the clouds upon the Attic Day,
And Syracuse draws tears for Marathon.


To whom these golden things best give delight:
The music of most sad Simonides;
Propertius’ ardent graces; and the might
Of Pindar chaunting by the olive trees:


Livy, and Roman consuls purple swathed:
Plutarch, and heroes of the ancient earth:
And Aristophanes, whose laughter scathed
The souls of fools, and pealed in lyric mirth:


Æolian rose-leaves blown from Sappho’s isle;
Secular glories of Lycean thought:
Sallies of Lucian, bidding wisdom smile;
Angers of Juvenal, divinely wrought:


Pleasant, and elegant,and garrulous,
Pliny: crowned Marcus, wistful and still strong:
Sicilian seas and their Theocritus,
Pastoral singer of the last Greek song:


Herodotus, all simple and all wise:
Demosthenes, a lightning flame of scorn:
The surge of Cicero, that never dies:
And Homer, grand against the ancient morn.

1890.